3 ms·
I kind of agree with the premise of the article. Having "enough experience" can lead to more accurate estimates in some cases, because the thing that makes esti
by onion2k 5y ago
I kind of agree with the premise of the article. Having "enough experience" can lead to more accurate estimates in some cases, because the thing that makes estimates inaccurate are the unknown aspects of the story. More knowledge about the domain, the codebase, the expectations of the client, and so on do make your estimates better because that knowledge simply means there are fewer unknown aspects.
For stories that have significant unknowns you'll still be wrong though.
However, even then it's still worthwhile providing estimates. The benefit comes from knowing how wrong you are. If you look at a story and have a guy feeling that it's quite simple but it actually takes far longer than the estimate that's useful data. It tells you that there's some aspect of the story that you weren't expecting, which can point to understanding where unknowns lie, or it means you thought the code was simpler than it really is so maybe there's some technical debt to be refactored, or it means that you failed to fully understand the implications of how far-reaching the story was so you should have done more upfront research. All those things can inform the next estimates you provide.
- karmelapple 5y agoOn our team, not only is estimation worthwhile, but the process of coming to a collective team consensus on an estimate is very worthwhile. We have our product owner in the estimation session (we use planning poker), we discuss requirements, assumptions, sometimes even a potential approach or two to building a solution. That process frequently leads to discovering unknown unknowns, new requirements, and sometimes even reevaluating whether we need the change. Estimation discussions involving a big chunk of the team can be truly useful.
- methyl 5y agoCan you just keep the process but skip the estimation part?