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I disagree as an IC of 10 years that's now gotten into eng management. Estimating is a useful tool that allows us to discuss upcoming projects, surface unknowns
by BowBun 4y ago
I disagree as an IC of 10 years that's now gotten into eng management. Estimating is a useful tool that allows us to discuss upcoming projects, surface unknowns, and build team understanding of the projects we're committing to. It's a bad idea to throw the baby out with the bathwater here, despite some terrible software organizations. There's a lot of bad applications of good ideas, and we'd be at a pretty big loss if we threw all of them out.
- Test0129 4y agoI just want the real agile back. The nice thing about a deadline is the tech illiterate understand them just as well as the people building it do. You can check in and have stand ups about the deadline all you want. You can even track work in tickets. Just no pointing. Ever.
- BowBun 4y agoHow would the team have any idea whether they can meet a deadline without estimates? I like the way we've set it up at my company. In product/engineering, we use our estimates and plan our projects in quarters and project more or less based on how many points teams have completed in the past. Outside of product/engineering, we report milestones on our projects with expected delivery dates. We don't mention the points because they mean nothing to the rest of the business without context. The only big problem I have with pointing is when those numbers are used as performance metrics or judged by outside stakeholders without context on the work. I think we've solved for that and get to reap the benefits