Anyone who has read "Rapid Development" or "Code Complete" by Steve McConnell will know he is an excellent author and writes from a lot of experience in the computer industry.

His latest book is "Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art" and is a great read, full of important insights and ideas. McConnell argues that whilst the average software organization can struggle with project costs that run double their original estimates, some of the more sophisticated organizations achieve results with estimation errors as low as 5-10%. However these best-in-class organizations use scientific techniques that are not cost-effective for most software development organizations.

To address this problem, McConnell focuses on the art of software estimation and provides a practical and cost-effective set of procedures and heuristics that will be relevant to the majority of software developers, technical leads, and project managers.