Agile Maxims<\/a>\u00a0]<\/strong><\/p>\nYou are perhaps thinking “But Woody – you seem to have a very deeply held belief that Estimates* are Useless and Wasteful<\/strong> – you should practice what you preach and Question That!”<\/p>\nSome will say “Woody: You should Practice what you Preach!!!”<\/h4>\n
You are absolutely right – I should <\/em>practice what I preach. (By the way – I don’t believe that all estimates* and estimating* is useless and wasteful, just a great deal of how they are typically used in software development).\u00a0\u00a0And of course, I have gotten to where I am in my thinking about estimates* by\u00a0questioning the value and usefulness\u00a0of estimates* over a\u00a0long time – in both the realm of software development as well as other fields I have experience with.\u00a0 Yet still, EVERY DAY, I re-scrutinize my thinking on\u00a0the value of estimates* – and whether or not we should use them.\u00a0 Sometimes more time, sometime less time – but it is rare that I don’t think about\u00a0the usefulness\u00a0of estimates* (or of\u00a0not having estimates*)\u00a0at some point in the day. \u00a0If estimates* bring value, and I am losing out on that value because I am too bone-headed to see it, I want to be set straight. And on the team I work with\u00a0we constantly experiment and try\u00a0 new things, old things, different things, same things – whatever we feel we need to do to learn and make things better.<\/p>\nSo… here are the sort of things I ask myself or consider every day about estimates*:<\/h4>\n\n- If I found that estimates* are indeed wasteful, what would I do?<\/li>\n
- If I found that estimates* were misleading and giving us bad information, what would I do?<\/li>\n
- What if estimates* never existed – if they were never invented… is there some other way we could work?<\/li>\n
- What if there is a better way to get the right work done using some other process, would I still estimate*?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
And it goes the other way:<\/h4>\n\n- What if we\u00a0were not able to make decisions unless we had estimates*, what would I change about our work?<\/li>\n
- What if we needed estimates*, but the estimates* we were doing were not very good, how would I fix that?<\/li>\n
- What if estimates* provide a way to see into the future and make GREAT decisions, what would I do?<\/li>\n
- and so on…<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
And so on<\/h4>\n
This whole questioning process takes little time on a daily basis.\u00a0 Occasionally, I scrutinize this sort of thing to a much deeper level – sometimes in a focused retrospective, or just thinking for a while, or in talking with other Agile-maniacs, or even\u00a0by doing (or attending)\u00a0a session at some user group or Agile Open event.\u00a0I WANT TO KNOW THE TRUTH!\u00a0 I want to steer and adjust my thinking.\u00a0 I have no pride – if I learn a better way, I will evaluate how to incorporate it into what we’re doing – and experiment, reflect, tune, adjust, throw out, bring back, etc.\u00a0 I am always open to\u00a0THROW OUT THE OLD if it is no longer useful.<\/p>\n
Bottom Line<\/h4>\n
I don’t care if you use estimates* or not.\u00a0 If it brings value to you, do them. If you want my opinion: I suggest you find a way to make sure they help and don’t simply use them because “that is how we do things”.<\/p>\n
To quote the poet:<\/p>\n
Whatever gets you through the night, it’s alright, it’s alright.<\/h4>\n
NOTES:<\/p>\n
* For the purpose of this article, the sort of estimates I am discussing are the estimates typically asked for on many software development projects where a project, a feature, or a function, or a bug fix (or where a list of features or functions) are described and people are asked to come up with an approximate cost in time, money, or effort to do the work that will be required to provide the feature(s)\/function(s)\/capability(ies)\/bug fix(es) being requested.<\/p>\n
Disclaimer: There are many situations where estimates can be meaningful and useful. \u00a0This article is about situations where I don’t think they are typically meaningful or useful, and only in the realm of software development.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve noticed that there seems to be a lot of people who feel they get a lot of value out of doing estimates*.\u00a0 There also seems to be a growing number of people who suggest that estimates* are wasteful and even harmful to a project.\u00a0 Whichever\u00a0works for you, either way, use it.\u00a0I have only one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,22,24,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-estimating","category-no-estimating","category-noestimates","category-waterfall"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218"}],"version-history":[{"count":32,"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1004,"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218\/revisions\/1004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}