3. a good estimate is one that
provides clear enough view on the
project reality to allow the project
leadership to make good
decisions about how to control the
project to hit it’s targets.
4. Making an Estimation
while estimates solve a problem, what
problem do they solve, exactly?
TIME COST DATE
• “the business as a whole is trying to make a
decision — about how to spend it’s money (your
time)” Dan Milstein
• Businesses need certainty about what they will
get and when
• Unfortunately for most businesses there is very
rarely any certainty in software design and
development
5. • You can break the work down into
chunks and add it up
• you can look at a variety of similar
projects to compare
• you can stick your finger in the air
and guess
HOWTO
ESTIMATE
6. Vacations Holidays Sick days Training Weekends
Company meetings Department meetings
Setting up new workstations Installing new
v e r s i o n s o f t o o l s o n w o r k s t a t i o n s
Troubleshooting hardware and software
problems Ramp-up time for new team members
Mentoring of new team members Management
coordination/manager meetings Cutover/
deployment Data conversion Installation
Customization Requirements clarifications
Maintaining the revision control system
Supporting the build Maintaining the scripts
required to run the daily build Maintaining the
automated smoke test used in conjunction with
the daily build Installation of test builds at user
location(s) Creation of test data [Steve McConnell]
MISS ME?
9. What The Hell
We’ll define #NoEstimates as
running a software project
without any human estimation
process. If customers asks,
"How long will it take?" that's
estimating. If they ask what’s
next, that's #NoEstimates.
10. "My boss would never go for that" may
sound like an invitation for dialogue,
but it's actually a fiat.
A term used in policy
debate, the
affirmative's power to
pass the plan in order
to debate impacts.
Allows the debate to
progress instead of
debating whether or
not the plan will be
passed.
• Clearly, many software
customers want estimates. In
many cases, those are
reasonable.
• next logical question: What
problems do estimates solve,
and can we solve them a
different way?
11. ” #NoEstimates is not about
ditching estimates. It is about
improving the way we work such
that estimates become redundant.“
Neil Killick
12. When you tell the customer this
task will take 1-2 day
the customer hear 1 day
you hear 2 days
!
always the way
22. #NoEstimates
J.B. Rainsberger, the author of “jUnit Recipes”,
points out that his first solo software project was
just like this. Rainsberger made no promises up
front, offering instead to show working software
every two weeks — and also allowing the client to
fire him with as little as two weeks' notice.
1. Make Starting Amount of Money
Small; Deliver Working Software Often
23. John Carmack, CEO of Id Software, is famous for the
expression "it's done when it's done," so much so
that the phrase appears under Carmack's name
on WikiQuote.
!
It's worth noting that Apple, one of the largest
publicly traded organizations in the world, is
secretive about upcoming products and refuses to
make quarterly earnings estimates for shareholders
or Wall Street. It doesn't seem to be hurting them.
2. Drop Estimation From Your
Development Process Entirely
#NoEstimates
24. • Most planning work is eliminated here in favor of
developing high-level goals in collaboration with
the customer. !
• At the same time, that's essentially the business
model of Menlo Innovations.!
• By the end of a budget period, the customer could
steer to a place very different that the original
goal. The customer gets what it needs in the
moment — not what it thought it needed six
months ago.
3. Move From Contract Negotiation to
Partnership
#NoEstimates
25. !
•Troy Magennis, a former executive at Sabre
Holdings and Travelocity, has done some of the
most prominent work in this space. Magennis has
also developed predictive models that include
complex elements like deviation, cycle time,
defects/time for repair and so on…!
•Even without a complex model, most agile teams
are capable of producing a burn-down chart that
can answer the question, "Is this date and this
scope possible?"
22. Fund a Pilot That Delivers Working
Software; Then Use Modeling to
Forecast Schedule
#NoEstimates
• sounds crazy though
28. With the #NoEstimates approach we don't commit to
requirements that we are not going to immediately
work on
The reason is simple: requirements have a "best
before" date and expire.