In recent years, microservices architectures have become extremely popular, and for good reason. When managed properly, they improve scalability, foster faster development and deployment, and reduce data and domain coupling. Companies of all sizes—from small startups to large enterprises—have been migrating their monolithic applications to microservices and service-oriented architectures.

However, transitioning from a monolith to microservices is a significant step. Your team needs to be prepared for this change both technically and organizationally. Without careful planning, an improper migration can lead to serious issues in the future.

One of the important skills that a programmer should possess is the ability to estimate task completion times. Estimating work durations plays a key role in project planning, as well as ensuring the realism of goals and commitments to managers, colleagues, and users. However, there are often misunderstandings regarding the concepts of estimation and commitment, and their differences are not always clear. I have experienced both sides of this issue and know firsthand how harmful it can be to a project. Therefore, I decided to write this article to help programmers and managers understand this issue.