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Do you mind explaining why you say estimating is fundamental? I don’t disagree that it is important, I probably wouldn’t label it as fundamental, at least in a

Do you mind explaining why you say estimating is fundamental? I don’t disagree that it is important, I probably wouldn’t label it as fundamental, at least in a context of a company developing its own software internally.

ColinHayhurst 5y ago
Fair enough. It was the word that came to mind and I might have used a better one. Important doesn't quite capture it. Time is invariably the most precious resource, so perhaps "crucial".
x0x0 5y ago
It's one of the top two or three most important things. All teams have far more work than they can possibly do. A handful of things win; most things lose. Reasonable cost tradeoffs to pick which two or three things per quarter get worked on require estimates. And even in small startups, millions of dollars are spent on salaries per those decisions.
majormajor 5y ago
Even when developing your own stuff internally, you have a limited resource: your dev team's capacity to do work. The most important question for your internal software team is still "what should we work on" and estimates are a fundamental part of answering that. It's someone's job to figure out what things that team could do to provide the highest value. Usually some combo of product/sales/marketing/tech. But that's only half the equation! You also want to know how much it's going to cost, in terms of those scarce dev resources. If one project would add X value but take a year, and another set of projects would add Y, Z, and A value, but each only take four months, you want to compare Y+Z+A vs X to see what gets you the most value over the next year. So the better the estimates, the more rational you can be about what work gets done. If you have no estimates, you might pick a project that will go on for way too long, and not get the value out of it that you expected. (However, I doubt anywhere truly uses NO estimates. I've never seen a place that didn't at least have an informal level like "oh that'll be really hard" or "that'll take us a long time.")
- tikhonj 5y ago
  There's a qualitative difference between the sort of informal estimates you mentioned ("it'll be hard") vs the sort talked about here—people don't treat the informal estimates as commitments! As soon as an estimate is really a commitment it totally changes the dynamics around it and actively impacts autonomy, so my impression is that what people mean by "no estimates" is more like "no timeline commitments".

ColinHayhurst 5y ago

Fair enough. It was the word that came to mind and I might have used a better one. Important doesn't quite capture it. Time is invariably the most precious resource, so perhaps "crucial".

x0x0 5y ago

It's one of the top two or three most important things. All teams have far more work than they can possibly do. A handful of things win; most things lose. Reasonable cost tradeoffs to pick which two or three things per quarter get worked on require estimates. And even in small startups, millions of dollars are spent on salaries per those decisions.

majormajor 5y ago

Even when developing your own stuff internally, you have a limited resource: your dev team's capacity to do work. The most important question for your internal software team is still "what should we work on" and estimates are a fundamental part of answering that. It's someone's job to figure out what things that team could do to provide the highest value. Usually some combo of product/sales/marketing/tech. But that's only half the equation! You also want to know how much it's going to cost, in terms of those scarce dev resources. If one project would add X value but take a year, and another set of projects would add Y, Z, and A value, but each only take four months, you want to compare Y+Z+A vs X to see what gets you the most value over the next year. So the better the estimates, the more rational you can be about what work gets done. If you have no estimates, you might pick a project that will go on for way too long, and not get the value out of it that you expected. (However, I doubt anywhere truly uses NO estimates. I've never seen a place that didn't at least have an informal level like "oh that'll be really hard" or "that'll take us a long time.")

tikhonj 5y ago
There's a qualitative difference between the sort of informal estimates you mentioned ("it'll be hard") vs the sort talked about here—people don't treat the informal estimates as commitments! As soon as an estimate is really a commitment it totally changes the dynamics around it and actively impacts autonomy, so my impression is that what people mean by "no estimates" is more like "no timeline commitments".