<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:georgia,serif">Interesting. I just finished Steve McConnell's response to #NoEstimates, <a href="http://www.construx.com/10x_Software_Development/17_Theses_on_Software_Estimation_%28Expanded%29/">17_Theses_on_Software_Estimation_(Expanded)</a>.<br><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:georgia,serif">The most essential of those theses might be:<br><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><b>5. Estimates serve numerous legitimate, important business purposes.</b><br></blockquote></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:georgia,serif"><br>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.<br><b><br></b></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:georgia,serif">McConnell's response is basically, estimation does work if you know what you're doing and do it right. <br><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><b>1. Estimation is often done badly and ineffectively and in an overly time-consuming way.</b></blockquote><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><b>2. The root cause of poor estimation is usually lack of estimation skills.</b>)<br></blockquote><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:georgia,serif">And also that Scrum is actually very compatible with estimation, and that discussions should be pragmatic and not dogmatic:<br><b></b></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:georgia,serif"><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><b>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. </b></blockquote><div> </div><blockquote style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex" class="gmail_quote"><b>16. This is not religion. We need to get more technical and more economic about software discussions. </b></blockquote></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:georgia,serif"><br><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:georgia,serif">What did he call his burnup charts (charts that, by the way, support estimation at a glance)?<br></div><br><br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br clear="all"><div><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><font color="#888888"><div><b>-- <br>Joel Aufrecht<br></b></div><div>Team Practices Group<b><br></b></div><div>Wikimedia Foundation<br></div></font></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Sep 21, 2016 at 1:29 PM, Max Binder <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mbinder@wikimedia.org" target="_blank">mbinder@wikimedia.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div><div>I attended a Meetup last night, via Bay Area Agile Leadership Network.<br></div><div><br>Don't have Allen's deck, but here is his website with a lot of the same:<br><a href="http://holub.com/" target="_blank">http://holub.com/</a><br><br></div>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. <br><br>He also showed burnup charts (he didn't call them that) very similar to those on <a href="http://phlogiston.wmflabs.org" target="_blank">phlogiston.wmflabs.org</a>. <br><br></div><br></div>
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