I’ve recently graduated to planning/developing some fairly large web apps (multiple developers, many-month projects) with the agency that I work for. I’m a Front End Dev and have been asked to lead the estimation of the front end of some of these projects. The Project Managers have done a great job of involving me in all of the features gathering (they are agile projects), so I have a good idea of a lot of the features that will comprise the applications.
Even though I have all of this great info, I struggle to commit to an estimate in the absence of any sketches or designs. I used to do a bit of UX design at my previous job on large projects like this, so I understand that while investigating/designing, features could be scrapped or drastically modified depending on what the end user really needs, not what the client states during our discovery meetings. The part that worries me is that my estimates will be used in creating a fixed project price for the client.
Has anyone experienced this same issue, and if so, is it feasible to be making binding price estimates for the front end based on features, even though no one has taken a stab at the IA and UX yet?
