On estimation

The need for estimates is a fact of (project management) life, whether you’re using a traditional approach or agile ones. The latter try to do away with any exact numbers and instead use anything from t-shirt sizes over gummi bears to story points and treat the idea of estimates as a tool that is mainly intended for the team. However, as to be seen in this article posted on the ScrumAlliance website on story points versus task hours the matter of concrete time estimates comes up every now and then — there are customers and managers that want it and you have to figure out how your estimate / velocity is related to the team’s capacity for any given sprint. TL;DR:

For me, story point is high-level estimation of complexity made before sprint planning.[…]The task-hour estimation, on the other hand, is a low-level estimation[…]should be done during sprint planning for highest possible accuracy.

But, just like every other project manager, I made the experience that there is no such thing as “highest possible accuracy”, regardless of the number of ‘points’ you’re estimating (three-point estimates, anybody? How does that fit in with agile methods?) What does somewhat “work” (for varying degrees of “somehat”) is measuring how much work is ‘roughly’ possible in an iteration (aka velocity in Scrum) and estimating the ‘entire’ efforts according to the law of big numbers, but this is exactly not task-hour estimation. I’ve also worked with task hour estimates during the sprint planning as well, but I wouldn’t rely on the results. Exchanging estimates between developers (aka planning poker) has the main effect of quickly leading to a common understanding of the tasks that need to be done, which in my experience has much more value than any estimate. The insight that numeric estimates are not all that useful (to say the least) is also discussed in this highly opionated article on stop using story points — this is not about going back to estimating in hours or days, but about teams reaching a level of competence, expertise and confidence in their respective context where estimates are just waste.

However, reaching this transcendental level might be hard to reach for many teams, due to lack of experience or because of other more context dependent reasins. Joachim Seibert discusses in his nice article for the “ObjectSpektrum” magazine (5/12) “Agile estimating in teams” (behind a paywall, unfortunately and only in German, sorry), that if you need to come up with the big number for budgeting, you should strive to look at the entire picture. I.e. estimating the overall effort is more important than trying to completely estimate everything down to the tiniest detail — which isn’t possible anyway. Seibert lists two key ingredients for that: estimating a reference story which you stick to throughout the project and comparing the relative complexity of requirements, essentially sorting them by ‘size’. This is easy to forget with planning poker, but is at the very heart of the two other techniques that Seibert discusses: estimation game (by Steve Bockman, apparently) and magic estimation (by Boris Gloger, AFAICT). Both focus on building a common understanding of the relative complexity of the features to be build and are much simpler to apply to lots of stories. If you add velocity to the picture, i.e. you actively measure how much you can build and you can reach a stable project setup (compare this nice sweet spot for agile methods by Philippe Kruchten), you might be able to end up with something useful from all the effort you put into estimation.


I'll never be anybody's hero now

One aspect I think is important for a Scrum Master or Project Manager is to make sure that your team doesn’t go on a trip to Vienna (if that term doesn’t ring a bell, search for “Tom DeMarco peopleware”). Quite contrary to popular management belief, I think in general it’s not okay if “occasionally” somebody on the team “puts in some extra work”. There is a reason why many agile methodologies insist on keeping a sustainable pace. Besides all of the very good reasons for making sure your team members stay healthy (see this Burnout story as a negative example), there is also a management point to it: your understanding of what the team is capable of (in terms of results/effort, aka velocity) decreases substantially if you have to take “heroic behaviour” into account. It’s particular bad when you don’t see the connection between reached goals and involved effort, i.e. when team members just move their card from “working” to “done” late in the evening without making clear that it involved five hours more than initially estimated.

Heroic behaviour just can’t be counted on, because nobody will be able to keep it up over a substantial amount of time (that’s the very definition of not being substainable). It’s highly understandable that project members after having committed to some goal can be tempted to go out of their way to reach it. What team members might miss is that “heroic behaviour” can only have an influence on the “time” aspect of the magic triangle of “time, budget and quality”. Extra effort is just that: effort. Hence, it comes with a cost, with the cost it just takes to reach the goal. I’ve also seen that there is a misunderstanding of the term “commitment”. It’s not an unconditional promise of “I can do that task with the effort I think it takes”, there is also the implicit condition of “I understand correctly what the task involves and there is no other external negative influence” (e.g. the urgent bug that needs to be looked at, or the lack of sleep during three days of the week due to the kids being sick at home).

Commitment to a particular goal might at times conflict with taking responsibility for the project as a whole. As a general rule of thumb it’s nearly always much more important to think about the entire project / the big picture than about a small aspect of it. There is the exceptional situation that needs exceptional reaction and maybe exceptional effort. But it’s important to treat it like an exceptional situation. And for these exceptional situations it’s vital that they get treated like a mini project: they should have a clear purpose and have fixed start and end dates. Plus, they should come with a compensation. Scrum Masters and project managers alike should communicate clearly that exceptions are exceptions, not the rule. And team members should clearly communicate that it takes what it takes. When it comes to professional work, follow the 501 manifesto (in case you don’t directly understand the “501” part like I did: it’s not about jeans, but about leaving at 5:01pm).

ObTitle: Morrissey, from “Ringleader of the tormentors”


Agile development -- what is the benefit for the business?

In a recent meeting, a colleague of mine mentioned that we wanted to use agile development this time with that new project and that I would provide some insight as an ‘agile development expert’ (not that this would be a term I would use). This in turn brought me some curious looks and a pretty general question during the discussion: what is the benefit of an agile development model from a business perspective anyway?

If I remember correctly, my answer went in the direction that with an agile approach you can change your mind about what you really need/want to implement throughout the project, if you learn something ‘new’ about what is really required. The second important aspect is that you get quicker feedback which allows for more influence in case things don’t turn out right. After the meeting I started pondering the question a little, as I had the impression that my answer wasn’t that convincing, so what you find below is a more detailed written elaboration of it.

Basically, what “you can change your mind throughout the project” boils down to is that agile development gives you more options to make use of opportunities coming up along the way/throughout the time you need to implement the project. The most important idea here is that you don’t make decisions too early, because that limits your options. For an example, let’s assume that one feature we specify is that we want to have a ‘Facebook like’-button on the order page. Now, if we’re following the waterfall style ‘implementation follows after specification has been completed’ development model, you would specify that and design the page with the button and at some time in the future, you hopefully get your Facebook button. But maybe during the hypothetical nine months from now in which development happens, what if Germany’s privacy laws enforce new severe restrictions on the use of such buttons and, btw., Google+ is now the new hip site you have to support? You have to go through a (with larger features typically quite costly) change process, redo the specification, etc. This essentially makes the cost you had in writing the specification as well as for the design etc. a double problem: you didn’t get out any ROI, obviously, but additionally time has passed while writing specs, doing design etc. in which you didn’t really work on any results for the customer (lost opportunity: gather new clients with at least some new features).

So, you would have been better off with having the idea that at some point throughout the project you want ‘social media integration for marketing reasons’ and delaying what to do exactly until you’re really there (from a priority point of view) where this is a feature that you want implemented — i.e. you do the specification when your planning that feature to get implemented in the next development phase (which is typically two to four weeks with an agile development team). The idea is to take small, well defined steps that can be taken fast and starting out with the most important/valuable ones first, rather than to spend a lot of time on some ‘complete specification’ which withers fast throughout the projects implementation time.

The problematic point here is obviously, that it’s pretty difficult to say when exactly is the right point in time to make a decision. In general, there is no ‘right point’ — also often called the last responsible moment after which some opportunity is lost (I think the phrase was coined by Mary and Tom Poppendieck, see the excerpt from ‘Lean software development’) — but multiple points in time, depending on many aspects. Influencing aspects are things like business opportunities (e.g. a new feature nobody else has at that time) or reducing risks (projects risks) (cf. Alistair Coburn reconsidering the least responsible moment). The best answer I currently have seen when to make a decision is that it should be taken when you have ‘enough knowledge’, i.e. when you have carefully considered your options and evaluated them (cf. real options). Even thinking about options alone is typically a highly valuable undertaking in itself, because all to often people just assume that the ‘obvious way’ is the best one.

So, the general answer is probably along the way of: for the business side, agile development has the benefit that it provides more flexibility and more influence throughout the project phase while at the same time (possibly) generating real value/revenue more early. There is, of course, more to it that also has appeal from a business perspective, but that’s probably the main point. Feel free to add different opionions.


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