Although the US IT workforce has grown by 1% ... since the beginning of the year, the short-term hiring outlook continues to remain bleak ... [jobless] IT professionals [with] in-demand skills ... point the finger at H-1B visa holders and offshore programming outfits, where a growing number of companies are shifting their development and maintenance work to reduce costs.

-- Thomas Hoffman, ComputerWorld, 23 September 2002

In this month's CBR, we take on a classic issue: software estimation. It's a classic because it looks, on the surface, like something we ought to have figured out by now. There's a "way it's supposed to work" that looks plausible. That way -- the "objective estimation" version -- goes something like this: