Who Needs An Estimate?A Panel Discussion

Matt HeusserDavid Hoppe

Steve “Steve” RogalskyAnd Angela “Do no” Harms

Agile And Beyond – February, 2014

Dearborn, MI

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What are estimates for?

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• Schedule Control

• Cost Control

• Comparison Shopping

• Governance

Having asked the question “why do you estimates?” over and over again, I get answers that usually fit into these four categories:

A) Schedule Control. We need to have this done by may 1st to avoid bit penalties from the government.

B) Cost Control. If this costs us more than $5 million, it isn't worth doing.

C) Comparison Shopping. I could do project X or project Y - which should I do? Or is ProjectX even worth it?

D) Governance. We want to make sure the company is investing its time/money 'well.'

Having just done an

Having asked the question “why do you estimates?” over and over again, I get answers that usually fit into these four categories:

A) Schedule Control. We need to have this done by may 1st to avoid bit penalties from the government.

B) Cost Control. If this costs us more than $5 million, it isn't worth doing.

C) Comparison Shopping. I could do project X or project Y - which should I do? Or is ProjectX even worth it?

D) Governance. We want to make sure the company is investing its time/money 'well.'

Having just done an

The ‘why’ of estimates

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Let’s do an estimate!

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Quick - Estimate, in inches, the:

- Height of your foot - Distance from the top of your foot to your knee - Distance from the top of the knee to the belt - Distance from the belt to under-arms - Distance from under-arms to chin - Distance from chin to top of head

Add them up. Were you right?

This is called functional decomposition. It is the simplest of estimation stratgies. Now how’d you do?

We have you add up six known, unchanging things, and we were off by a lot. Can we all agree that technical estimates, more often than not, provide bad information that is susceptible to games ands manipulation?

Quick - Estimate, in inches, the:

- Height of your foot - Distance from the top of your foot to your knee - Distance from the top of the knee to the belt - Distance from the belt to under-arms - Distance from under-arms to chin - Distance from chin to top of head

Add them up. Were you right?

This is called functional decomposition. It is the simplest of estimation stratgies. Now how’d you do?

We have you add up six known, unchanging things, and we were off by a lot. Can we all agree that technical estimates, more often than not, provide bad information that is susceptible to games ands manipulation?

An example

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Our Definition of an estimate

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• A technical contributor

• ...taking time from work

• ...to provide hours and dates

• ...to predict the scheduleThis is our definition of an estimate.

#NoEstimates, then, recognizes that time spend estimating could be spend on delivery - code, analysis, tests.

Not only that, but Estimates often fail to live up to their promises - they don’t do the things we listed in the previous slide, or do them so poorly that they offer no additional value.

This is our definition of an estimate.

#NoEstimates, then, recognizes that time spend estimating could be spend on delivery - code, analysis, tests.

Not only that, but Estimates often fail to live up to their promises - they don’t do the things we listed in the previous slide, or do them so poorly that they offer no additional value.

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Introducing Our Panelists

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David Hoppe

Steve Rogalsky

Angela Harms

Matt Heusser

Each particpant gets up to 2 minutes to introduce themselves. After that, we’ll switch the URL to:

http://shamblespad.com/p/NoEstimates

take questionsvotesortand answer!

Each particpant gets up to 2 minutes to introduce themselves. After that, we’ll switch the URL to:

http://shamblespad.com/p/NoEstimates

take questionsvotesortand answer!

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Where to go for more

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Woody Zuill - No Estimates

Arlo Belshee - Naked Planning

‘No Estimates’ in Action: 5 ways to rethink Software Projects

How to Move Beyond Project Estimates and Provide Better Value

Just a google search away: