Joel Spolsky posted an article a while back on what he calls Evidence Based Scheduling - essentially a more sophisticated version of Steve's "Fudge Factor". It's built into his Project Management Software, FogBugz.
Evidence Based Scheduling also has a feature I've never seen before: Instead of giving you a specific due date based on the current schedule, it uses statistical analysis to give you a probability distribution curve of when it will be done. So it gives you not only an estimate of when you'll be done, but also the margin of error for that estimate.
Pretty nifty stuff...
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When people see things as beautiful, ugliness is created.
When people see things as good, evil is created.
When the way is forgotten, 'morality' and 'piety' need to be taught.
-Dao De Jing, Chapter 2
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