What is the method to analyze tasks involved in completing a project, to identify the needed minimum time to complete a total project?

The method, whose name is abbreviated to four letters, was initially developed by Charles E. Clark for the United States Navy in 1958, particularly for the missile project Polaris. Often used in conjunction with Critical Path Method (CPM), because CPM employs a time estimation and a cost estimation, whereby the questioned method may utilize three time estimates - optimistic, expected and pessimistic. The questioned method actually defines a total of four time types, in addition to previously listed three, also "most likely".

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Answer to yesterday's question: Monte Carlo is the name of the simulation, method, or experiment, that leans on repeated random sampling to crack problems too messy for a clean formula.

It was born on the Manhattan Project in the 1940s: Stanisław Ulam hit on the idea idly working out the odds of winning a game of solitaire. He realized it was easier to estimate by dealing many hands than to compute the combinatorics.

He co-developed it with John von Neumann, and in 1948 they ran the first automated Monte Carlo calculations — modelling neutron behaviour in a fission core — on the ENIAC. The name was a wartime code name, suggested by Nicholas Metropolis after Ulam's uncle, who kept borrowing money to gamble at the Monte Carlo casino in Monaco.

The principle is utilized for example for weather forecasting, but also for probabilistic delivery forecasting in software development. Instead of committing to a single "we'll ship in six sprints," the project is simulated thousands of times from historical throughput, where the spread shows likely finish dates.