Ask HN: How do you deal with or improve software development estimates?

Estimating software development work is hard. There are typically many reasons for that, but this is something that we, software development professionals, have to live with. But thankfully there are ways to improve this process (e.g. breaking the project down into smaller pieces, staged delivery, conducting pre-mortems, regular status checks, etc.)

What are some techniques/approaches you've successfully used to improve software development estimates? Any recommended reading on the subject?