I’ve been working with folks making their transition to agile. One of the hardest transitions is for the managers and technical leaders. Managers are accustomed to working in timeboxes. To them, the iteration is a timebox. But, they also are accustomed to features spanning multiple timeboxes, and that’s not OK in agile. They are accustomed
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
Edit Those Epics: Stories Don’t Span Iterations was posted on Techwell, the new site of Stickyminds.com. Yes, I will have to figure out how to change my tags/categories. Please do leave comments over there, I will be responding.
Shane Hastie and I have been working across timezones in preparation for a workshop: Working Effectively With Distributed Agile Teams. I’m keynoting at SDC in a couple of weeks, and am looking forward to being back in Wellington and Sydney. First, Shane and I built a backlog in Google docs, so we could both see
I still have estimation on the mind. I saw The Impact of Accidental Complexity on Estimates and I was wondering about the effect of management on bad code. Do managers sometimes force developers to write bad code by allowing technical debt? Jay’s third point implicates technical debt as a cause: Introducing technical debt increases accidental
In But I Need to Know When the Project Will Be Done, I talked about what you can do for estimating an agile project (do a gross estimate of the backlog, estimate your velocity, better your estimate every iteration and keep talking to your management). What if you have a contract? What if your managers