[teampractices] Saw a presentation by Allen Holub

[Joel Aufrecht]

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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