I spent the most recent four weeks conferencing. I had a blast. Because I kept traveling, I nicknamed this series of conferences my “Northern Hemisphere Conference Tour.” I’ve posted the slides on slideshare.net. Oct 24-Oct 28, I was in Vancouver, BC at Much Ado About Agile 2011. I delivered a keynote entitled, “Where is Agile […]
So where does all of this get us with budgets and dates? In many ways, estimating project budgets or dates for agile projects turns out to be irrelevant. If you have a ranked backlog, and you finish features, you can always stop the project if you hit a particular date or cost. It does matter
In Part 3, you had some knowledge of the team’s velocity. This is the option of when you do not have knowledge of the team’s velocity, because this team has not worked together before, or has not worked on a project like this before. You are all coming in blind. Your Zeroth Best Bet: Wait
You have options for estimation, once you have met the preconditions. If you don’t have the feature set in a ranked order, you are in trouble. That’s because if you use any lifecycle other than an agile lifecycle, the feature order matters to your estimates, and the team will discuss the feature order in addition
So now that you know why it’s so difficult to estimate what do you do when someone asks you for an estimate? Preconditions for Estimation First, you ask a question back: “What’s most important to you? If it’s 3 weeks before the end of the project, and we haven’t finished all the features and we
Almost every manager I know wants to know when a project will be done. Some managers decree when a project will be done. Some managers think they can decree both the date and the feature set. There is one other tiny small subset, those managers who ask, “When can you finish this set of ranked
Israel Gat had a great Agile Cutter Advisor recently, the Friction of Agile (registration required). He discussed the friction of agile going up in geographically distributed teams because of the dis-economies of assimilation (the space-time continuum problem, and the issue of under-funding the infrastructure of the non US-based teams). He had a stunning (to me)
In my post, When You Have No Product Owner at All, I said That’s because agile needs a responsible person who is not part of the cross-functional technical team to rank the backlog so the team knows the order of the work. Without that person, the team does not know what to do. I’ve had
I recently spoke with a colleague who’s a little confused. John was just promoted to being the development manager in a small organization. He’s used to doing lots of work—whatever needs to be done, he does. Now, he’s managing 6 developers in an organization that’s trying to move to agile. No, they haven’t had any
There was a question on a LinkedIn group earlier this week about a program with teams with interconnected features and how did you know when a feature was done. After all, a feature wasn’t done until all the teams were done with it. After a few more questions, I realized the teams were architectural teams,