Agile Estimation Quotes

To be uncertain is to be uncomfortable, but to be certain is to be ridiculous.” —Chinese proverb

No plan survives contact with the enemy." —Field Marshal Helmuth Graf von Moltke

Recommended Reading Mike Cohn in his book User Stories Applied provides insights and details on user stories, including how to write them and their characteristics. His book Agile Estimating and Planning provides guidance on prioritizing user stories. Luke Hohmann in his book Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play describes 12 innovation games. The Definitive Guide to Getting Your Budget Approved by Johannes Ritter and Frank Röttgers provides a systematic guide for creating a quantifying the economic value for projects.

Lake Natron resided in northern Tanzania near an active volcano known as Ol Doinyo Lengai. It was part of the reason the lake had such unique characteristics. The mud had a curious dark grey color over where Jack had been set up for observation, and he noted that there was now an odd-looking mound of it to the right of one of the flamingo’s nests. He zoomed in further and further, peering at it, and then realized what he was actually seeing. The dragon had crouched down beside the nests and blended into the mud. From snout to tail, Jack calculated it had to be twelve to fourteen feet long. Its wings were folded against its back, which had small spines running down the length to a spiky tail. It had a fin with three prongs along the base of the skull and webbed feet tipped with sharp black talons. He estimated the dragon was about the size of a large hyena. It peered up at its prey with beady red eyes, its black forked tongue darting out every few seconds. Its shoulder muscles bunched and its hind legs tensed. Then it pounced. The dark grey dragon leapt onto one of flamingoes atop its nest and seized it by the throat. The bird squawked in distress and immediately beat its wings, trying to free itself. The others around them took to the skies in panic. The dragon slammed it into the mud and closed its jaws around the animal’s throat, blood spilling everywhere. The flamingo yelped out its last breaths and then finally stilled. The dragon dropped the limp carcass and sniffed the eggs before beginning to swallow them whole one at a time. “Holy shit,” Jack muttered. “Have we got a visual?” “Oh, yeah. Based on the size, the natives and the conservationists were right to be concerned. It can probably wipe out a serious number of wildlife in a short amount of time based on what I’m seeing. There’s only a handful of fauna that can survive in these conditions and it could make mincemeat out of them.” “Alright, so what’s the plan?” “They told me it’s very agile, which is why their attempts to capture it haven’t worked. I’m going to see if it responds to any of the usual stimuli. So far, they said it doesn’t appear to be aggressive.” “Copy that. Be careful, cowboy.” “Ten-four.” Jack glanced down at his utility belt and opened the pocket on his left side, withdrawing a thin silver whistle. He put it to his lips and blew for several seconds. Much like a dog whistle, Jack couldn’t hear anything. But the dragon’s head creaked around and those beady red eyes locked onto him. Jack lowered the whistle and licked his dry lips. “If I were in a movie, this would be the part where I said, ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this.’” The dragon roared, its grey wings extending out from its body, and then flew straight at him.

In Bergotte’s books, which I constantly reread, the sentences were as clear to me as my own thoughts, I perceived them as distinctly as the furniture in my room and the carriages in the streets. Everything was easily visible, if not as one had always seen it, then certainly as one was accustomed to see it now. But a new writer had just started to publish work in which the relations between things were so different from those that connected them for me, that I could understand almost nothing in his writing.... Only I felt that it was not the sentence that was badly constructed, but that I myself lacked the energy and agility to see it through to the end. I would make a fresh start, working really hard to reach the point where I could see the new connections between things. At each attempt, about half-way through the sentence, I would fall back defeated, as I did later in the army in horizontal bar exercises... From then on I felt less admiration for Bergotte, whose transparency struck me as a shortcoming... The writer who had supplanted Bergotte in my estimation sapped my energy not by the incoherence but by the novelty – perfectly coherent – of associations I was not used to making. Because I always felt myself falter in the same place, it was clear that I needed to perform the same feat of endeavour each time. And when I did, very occasionally, manage to follow the author to the end of his sentence, what I discovered was always a humour, a truthfulness, a charm similar to those I had once found reading Bergotte, only more delightful.

Because the estimate for each feature is made relative to the estimates for other features, it does not matter if our estimates are correct, a little incorrect, or a lot incorrect. What matters is that they are consistent.

Individuals should be given every incentive possible to work as a team. If the team’s throughput is increased by my helping someone else, that’s what I should do. Team velocity matters; individual velocity doesn’t.

No one should sign up for more than one or two cards at a time.

Recommended Reading Mike Cohn Agile Estimating and Planning provides guidance on iteration planning, including estimating the effort for user stories. David J. Anderson Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business provides the guidance, definitions, and metric calculations necessary to establish an efficient software development flow, including establishing WIP limits.

Planning is everything. Plans are nothing." —Field Marshal Helmuth Graf von Moltke

A key tenet of agile estimating and planning is that we estimate size but derive duration.

Even with a well-intentioned and highly communicative team, it is possible that the results of an iteration could be found worthless when shown to the broader organization or external users at the conclusion of the iteration.

If you tie iterations to the ends of months, one out of every three iterations will coincide with the end of a fiscal quarter.

The cone of uncertainty shows that during the feasibility phase of a project a schedule estimate is typically as far off as 60% to 160%. That is, a project expected to take 20 weeks could take anywhere from 12 to 32 weeks. After the requirements are written, the estimate might still be off +/- 15% in either direction. So an estimate of 20 weeks means work that takes 17 to 23 weeks. Figure 1.1. The cone of uncertainty narrows as the project progresses.

20% on detailed planning (Their poor throughput and high lead times were misattributed to faulty estimation, and so, hoping to get a better answer, they were asked to estimate the work in greater detail.)

Are you constantly asked to start new work before you have had a chance to finish old work? - Are you constantly asked to expedite new requests in addition to being expected to get all of your other current work done according to original estimates and commitments? - How many features do you start but do not finish because they get cancelled while you are working on them? How likely is it that the new items that replace the cancelled work will themselves get cancelled? - When something that you are working on gets blocked (for whatever reason), do you simply put that blocked work aside and start to work on something new? - Do your estimates give consideration to how many other items will be in progress at the time you start work? - Do you ignore the order in which you work on items currently in progress? - Do you constantly add new scope or acceptance criteria to items in progress because it is easier to modify an existing feature rather than to open a new one? - When an item takes too long to complete, have you ever said or heard someone say “it is just bigger than we thought it was” and/or “it will get done when it gets done”? - When things take too long to complete, is management’s first response always to have the team work overtime?

Agile thought leader Bill Wake created a set of guidelines for writing good user stories; to make them easier to remember, he uses the acronym INVEST: Independent: A good story should be independent of other stories. Stories shouldn't overlap in concept and should be implementable in any order. Negotiable: A good story isn't an explicit contract for features. The details for how a story's benefit will be delivered should be open to discussion. Valuable: A good story needs to be valuable to the customer. Estimable: A good story is one whose scope can be reasonably estimated. Small: Good stories tend to be small in scope. Larger stories will have greater uncertainty, so you should break them down.

People learn together by working together. Don’t waste time on fake team-building activities such as anything physical. Those activities might be fun for some people, but they don’t help people learn how to work together at work.

Create an opening to deliver feedback. Describe the behavior or result in a way that the person can hear. State the impact using “I” language. Make a request for continued or changed behavior.

One of the best ways to create team safety is to create an environment in which team members feel safe to take risks.

Instead of failing fast, consider learning early. I find that learning early creates a different mindset for me. I now create small, safe-to-fail experiments. I manage my ambiguity around the entire deliverable by creating small steps.

You can’t go faster when you avoid technical excellence.

Some projects are undertaken to generate revenue and others to cut expenses, and some strive for both. If we can estimate the amount of money that will be made or saved by each theme, we can use that to help prioritize.

Team self-management and organization challenges the lead role definition. It’s difficult for many leads to give up making detailed decisions for teams on a daily basis and allow them to risk failure, even for smaller challenges. However, the benefits of growing self-management becomes apparent as some of the more mundane management duties of a lead, such as task creation, estimation, and tracking, are taken over by the team.

Markets change, visions change, technologies change, teams change, settings change, relationships change… with an ever changing environment it will be naive to think that you can draw the future with a straight line.

Having regular check-ins to align direction is super powerful, the ability to tune and adjust reduces waste and deviation and realignment.

Changes are not like for like, it already has an extra weight for the context switch & let’s not forget about the time already invested in the initial thought path that will no longer be valid.