Comment by mightybyte

Completely agree with this idea. And I would add a corollary...date estimates (i.e. deadlines) should also have error bars. After all, a date is a forecast. If a stakeholder asks for a date, they should also specify what kind of error bars they're looking for. A raw date with no estimate of uncertainty is meaningless. And correspondingly, if an engineer is giving a date to some other stakeholder, they should include some kind of uncertainty estimate with it. There's a huge difference between saying that something will be done by X date with 90% confidence versus three nines confidence.