There is a Blog Video speaking the #NoEstimates that opens with the following. Let's look at the credibility of each of the statements below:
- Estimating can be an endemic problem in organisations these days because estimating is fundamentally guessing, yet these guesses are taken as promises / firm commitments (when that is not how they were intended).
- If you're guessing, you're not estimating. You're Guessing. This is a common #NoEstimates statement, which is flatly wrong and manipulative of terms.
- Estimates are informed by past data or a model.
- The uncertainties of the estimates have accruracy and precision. The values need to defined before the estimating process starts. Then you have a target value used to control the effort invested in producing the estimate
- Moving away from this is better for everyone since developers are not in trouble for not hitting a deadline they knew to be rubbish, and managers are not angry that what they thought was a delivery commitment has not been met.
- This is the classic approach of #NoEstimates advocates. Describe blatantly bad management then suggest that Not Estimating will fix this behavior.
- The "cause" of this bad management is not address, so what ever symptoms are identified will be corrected or prevented, since the cause will remain.
- In more contexts, this is called "whining," with no fix other than just "whine."
- Coming up with point estimates is waste as it delivers no direct value to the customer.
- No credible estimate is a point estimate
- This is obvious to any high school student if they took a probability and statistics class.
- This is another example of intentional misinformation to try and convince the listeners that estimates can be made.
- Rather than giving estimates we should give forecasts.
- Estmates are about the past, percent, and future
- Estimates of the future based on data from the past are called Forecasts
- Another example of manipulating terms to serve a need to not say the work "estimate" in the #NoEstimates community
- You should be aligning your roadmap (epics / features / stories) so that the most important elements are done first, across all slices.
- Yes, this is good project management, good Agile, good business management
- The definition of "important" needs units of measure meaningful to the decision makers
- Vasco Duarte shows research in his book NoEstimates: How To Measure Project Progress Without Estimating that by simply counting the number of stories you have to deliver, you will be able to track sprint by sprint to an outcome (end date) that is almost identical to the one you would have got from doing detailed estimating.
- This is not research in the normal sense. It's data gathered by Vasco from his anecdotes.
- The data shows wide range of variance, to the point that no credible outcome can be made from this data.
- +/- 40% variance is not a number, you'd want to make a decision with. Very close to coin flipping.
- So in fact, using this data actually is Guessing
There is no principle, in the presence of uncertainty, by which any decision can be made without estimating. To suggest otherwise, willfully ignores this immutable principle.
