[teampractices] Saw a presentation by Allen Holub

[Joel Aufrecht]

I skimmed through his #NoEstimates video until I saw burnup charts:

https://youtu.be/QVBlnCTu9Ms?t=1616

His argument seems to be (and I'm not watching the whole 40 minutes so I
could be going out of context) that you can do projections from burnups and
use that instead of estimation.  "Now I guess this is estimating but it's
not really estimating, all we are doing is counting."

It sounds like he's opposed to a particular kind of estimation, in favor of
another kind of estimation, and perhaps using a bit of hyperbole as a
marketing tool.



*-- Joel Aufrecht*
Team Practices Group
Wikimedia Foundation

On Wed, Sep 21, 2016 at 2:38 PM, Joel Aufrecht <jaufrecht at wikimedia.org>
wrote:

> Interesting.  I just finished Steve McConnell's response to #NoEstimates,
> 17_Theses_on_Software_Estimation_(Expanded)
> <http://www.construx.com/10x_Software_Development/17_Theses_on_Software_Estimation_%28Expanded%29/>
> .
>
> The most essential of those theses might be:
>
> *5. Estimates serve numerous legitimate, important business purposes.*
>>
>
> ​I think the #NoEstimates response to that is, estimation doesn't work, so
> even if estimates would be nice, estimation doesn't actually provide them.
>
> McConnell's response is basically, estimation does work if you know what
> you're doing and do it right.
>
> *1. Estimation is often done badly and ineffectively and in an overly
>> time-consuming way.*
>
>
>
>> *2. The root cause of poor estimation is usually lack of estimation
>> skills.*)
>>
>
> And also that Scrum is actually very compatible with estimation, and that
> discussions should be pragmatic and not dogmatic:
>
> *14. Scrum provides better support for estimation than waterfall ever did,
>> and there does not have to be a trade off between agility and
>> predictability. *
>
>
>
>> *16. This is not religion. We need to get more technical and more
>> economic about software discussions. *
>
> ​
>
> What did he call his burnup charts (charts that, by the way, support
> estimation at a glance)?
>
>
>
>
>
> *-- Joel Aufrecht*
> Team Practices Group
> Wikimedia Foundation
>
> On Wed, Sep 21, 2016 at 1:29 PM, Max Binder <mbinder at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>> I attended a Meetup last night, via Bay Area Agile Leadership Network.
>>
>> Don't have Allen's deck, but here is his website with a lot of the same:
>> http://holub.com/
>>
>> TL;DR: His presentation was about how estimation is bad (among other
>> things, he argues that estimating is unethical). I felt it was a fairly
>> aggro presentation (full disclosure: I'm pro-estimation), but under the
>> veil of what I observed as an extremist view of Agile was a message
>> promoting Agile as a state of mind, rather than a
>> panacea-by-rigid-structure, all too often deployed by "Agile" companies.
>>
>> He also showed burnup charts (he didn't call them that) very similar to
>> those on phlogiston.wmflabs.org.
>>
>>
>>
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>>
>>
>
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