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NoEstimates - Vasco Duarte

Agile Testing Days

3.1K subscribers • 1 video on Hallway

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  • Recommended by 2 people: 2 in engineering communities.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2022 to 2025.
  • Presented by Vasco Duarte, author of NoEstimates
  • An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

15K views9 years ago2 recommendations

Tools and practiceCareers and interviewsCode review and teamworkDeveloper productivity

Vasco Duarte presents the principles of NoEstimates, arguing that software can be delivered on time and budget without traditional estimation.

What would software development look like without estimates? Is it even possible to run a software project without estimating? In this talk we review some of the main ideas behind NoEstimates and describe 10 principles for software development that support the view that Software can be successfully delivered, on time, and on budget without using the tools of estimation. There are many things that look different in a world without estimates, and in this talk we review some of those differences.

Why it's here

2 people recommend this

What people say. Highly recommended by developers who advocate for evidence-driven forecasting over traditional, often inaccurate software estimation.

u/LogicRaven_in r/ExperiencedDevs • Recommends

On “How to scale your estimates when adding more people?”

This is the way. Measure and forecast instead of estimation. Also note that adding new people will slow down the team for a while, because of onboarding and slow down a bit on the long run because of higher communication overhead. Might be also interesting: link to this video
26View on Reddit

u/LogicRaven_in r/ExperiencedDevs • Recommends

On “Advice on Motivating Underperforming Team Members as a Tech Lead”

…timeline setting. Estimates sometimes use ideal dev days, without meetings, breaks, unforeseen issues, etc. Also sometimes estimates are focused on coding time, belittling time needed for reaching a common understanding of the feature and the design, testing and retesting, documentation, etc. Some interesting thoughts on estimation vs forecast: link to this video You could consider how to protect the team from this. Do you or the team has a saying in the timeline? Are there ways to use forecasting and making it easier to shift the deadline. Could there be resting periods between pushes - for example an innovation sprint. Could some of them need a rotation to a lower speed team for a while (maint…
6View on Reddit

u/LogicRaven_in r/ExperiencedDevs • Recommends

On “How to Improve SDL Process and Prevent Team Burnout?”

I personally don't like estimates, always inaccurate and always time consuming to do. But reality is that many customers can't give up the illusion of predictability. Here are some links that might help a bit: link to this video https://medium.com/the-liberators/how-to-sell-agile-to-your-customers-f81d2deba40c
5View on Reddit

u/LogicRaven_in r/ExperiencedDevs • Recommends

On “Ask Experienced Devs Weekly Thread: A weekly thread for inexperienced developers to ask experienced ones”

Appears, but it is a mistake in my opinion. Keywords: agile theater, zombie scrum. Also this could be interesting: link to this video
2View on Reddit

u/LogicRaven_in r/ExperiencedDevs • Recommends

On “Ask Experienced Devs Weekly Thread: A weekly thread for inexperienced developers to ask experienced ones”

There is none I know of. Estimates are worthless, because we mostly work with complex tasks, where the time needed for the unkown factors can overweight the time needed for the known factors with a magnitude or two. This creates such a big variation in time needed that even if you pad your estimates with a high %, there will be cases when you will be over estimate. So if your environment requires estimations, them do your best educated guess, but don't sweat over it. If you go over estimate, communicate and update expectations as soon as you have a better estimate. link to this video link to this video
1View on Reddit

u/awildmanappearsin r/ExperiencedDevs • Recommends

On “I don't have the stress tolerance for this career”

It's not the whole answer, but I find that properly setting expectations early relieves the pressure. I'm a fan of forecasting over estimating, for example. And then communicating that running forecast early and often to stakeholders. I found that using an evidence-driven forecast tends to get people's heads out of their butts about unrealistic expectations and puts them more in a mode of negotiating and finding constructive alternatives. Vasco Duarte explains it better than me link to this video
1View on Reddit