Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Agility

NOTE: This was a lightning talk proposal for Agile 2013 in Nashville.  My main purpose in this post was to have a chance to give a lightning talk on “No Estimates” at that conference.  An additional purpose is to encourage people to be thinking about the sort of estimates we use in software development, why we think they are useful, why we depend on them so heavily, and some of the reasons we might want to re-think our dependence on estimates.

Fortunately for me, I was chosen to present this lightning talk, which challenged me to put together a focused slide deck and talk on the subject, which then grew into the talk which I gave at Oredev 2013.

Going forward, my is goal to expose the sort of thinking and questioning I have been doing over the last 10+ years so that others who have been asking can use these questions as a starting point in their own exploration of estimate-driven software development.

I am not offering to answer these questions for you.  Only you can do that.

I want to emphasize this: If you want to discuss these ideas with me, I am always happy to talk with almost anyone – either via Skype, or at a conference or developer meetup.  If you demand that I answer these questions for you, then you have misunderstood the purpose of this question list.  Again: I am not offering to answer these questions for you. I am offering these questions as a starting point for your own journey of exploration and learning.  I encourage you to use them.

Now: the original post:

I’m proposing an “idea” to present for the Agile2013 Lightning Talk stage under the Process At Scale theme.

Title: No Estimates

Talk summary: Ask a lot of questions, answer a few.

Please vote for it here: Agile2013 Lightning Talk On No Estimates

Here are the things I have been asking myself about Estimates:

• What are estimates, anyways?
• Are estimates useless? wasteful? harmful?
• Who needs them? Who is asking for them?
• Why do we think we need them?
• Can we have successful projects without estimates?
• When will this be done? How much will it cost?
• How can we decide if we should do a project without knowing the cost?
• Is NoEstimates better than MoEstimates?
• How expensive are useful estimates?
• How useful are inexpensive estimates?
• If it takes you “no time” to do estimates, are they of any value?
• If estimates are waste, would you still do them?
• Is the reason you do estimates because “someone requires I do estimates”?
• Why do they require you to do estimates – is it because someone “higher” is asking them for estimates?
• When someone asks for an estimate, what do you do?
• When estimates don’t work well for us, should we just get “better at doing estimates”?
• If estimates are useful and easy to do, why do we still have so many problems with estimates?
• How would you plan a project if you were NOT allowed to do estimates?
• Can you imagine any reason why estimates might be harmful?
• Can you imagine some better way?
• How important are predictions?
• Can you “sell” programming without estimates?
• What about estimating the “value” of a feature?
• Are there things where estimates make sense?
• What is “No Estimates” anyway?
• If estimates are good for some things, does that mean they are good for everything?
• Does “No Estimates” mean we don’t use estimates at all?
• What are “Whole Team Estimates” and does it help at all?
• If you are estimating about work you don’t yet understand to be done by someone you haven’t yet hired, is that meaningful?
• How much are you willing to invest in estimates to get useful information from them?
• Does it matter how good estimates are: are “wild guesses” good enough?
• Are the decisions you are making that are based on estimates good decisions?

We’ll ask some of these questions. Perhaps explore a few ideas. Maybe answer a few.

Stuff like that.