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#noestimates#agile#softwareestimation

#NoEstimates (Allen Holub)

Allen Holub

5.6K subscribers • 1 video on Hallway

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  • Recommended by 4 people: 2 on Hacker News, 1 on Lobsters and 1 curated list.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2019 to 2022.
  • Presented by Allen Holub, author and agile consultant
  • An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

258K views11 years ago4 recommendations

Tools and practiceSoftware designCode review and teamworkDeveloper productivitySoftware architecture

Allen Holub argues against traditional software estimation in Agile environments and presents alternative, data-driven planning methods.

This keynote presents my (and many other's) thinking about #NoEstimates. It argues that estimation is a bad thing, particularly in the Agile world, and presents ways to plan that don't involve estimation.

Why it's here

4 people recommend this

What people say. Highly recommended as a well-reasoned critique of software estimation and a guide to alternative planning approaches.

Vinalinon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Deadlines Are Killing Us, and Almost Everything Else I Know About Leadership”

There's an interesting video by Allen Holub that I've seen on the somewhat related topic of ridding software development of estimates (#NoEstimates)1. He argues that they're responsible for deadlines that are impossible to meet due to them being based completely on a guess. He then goes on to talk about how we can still get predictive power without giving estimates. I found it extremely interesting and highly recommend it. 1 link to this video
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coryfkleinon Hacker News • Recommends

On “I don’t believe in sprints”

One could write a solid critique of sprints and how they help or don't, and where time is wasted, but this article is overzealous and comes off as motivated more by anger than reasoning. If you want a well-reasoned discussion of where the waste is and isn't, I highly recommend Allen Holub's talk #NoEstimates 0. 0 link to this video
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every-programmer-should-knowcurated list on GitHubRecommends

Under “Engineering Philosophy”

:movie_camera: #NoEstimates
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Meckion Software Engineering Stack Exchange • Mentions

On “How to make Scrum less stressful”

As I understand it, Scrum should have been developed to simplify the lives of developers. No, that's what agile software development was created for. Scrum was created to ensure that management retains roughly the same level of control it had before agile software development existed, and that it can continue to work pretty much as before without having to adapt too much, and still be able to sell the idea of "we're agile now" to developers without having to become truly agile itself. Agile development itself does not require most of the things that Scrum introduces. And I don't see how anything that Scrum introduces really makes life easier for developers compared to agile development w…
24View the answer

tekkno89on Hacker News • Mentions

On “How I started believing in Cycle Time over Estimation”

he also links to a conference talk about this. "you can make a claim that estimates are based on past behavior, but the fact is that what you're implementing is something that hasn't been implemented before. So any kind of measurement that you've made of something that has happened in the past is not going to impact what you're doing now" link to this video
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snorberhuison Hacker News • Mentions

On “How I started believing in Cycle Time over Estimation”

Thank you for your comment! > But I don't get how they went from that to "estimations are bad". It seems to me that they're just doing better estimations now by looking at historical data? For me personally, I went from estimations are just really poor even for the most simple things and not worth the effort. It is correct that is can still be seen as migrating to a better form of estimation. If you look at the conference talk by Allen Holub1. He tries to make the distinction between estimation and prediction is that the latter is only data driven. > Maybe the team leader is confused because they thought this was a man-hour estimation? And they're now afraid that one developer will work fu…
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azemetreon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Microsoft researched what made employees happy”

Apparently if you do zero estimating (or just count the amount of stories), it makes ZERO difference when calculating your cumulative-flow diagram. link to this video Money segment is at the 26m15s mark. The wasted effort of trying to estimate stories provides zero business value in this context.
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codr7on Hacker News • Mentions

On “Hard-to-swallow truths they won't tell you about software engineer job”

Planning doesn't mean estimation though; we all know it's just guesswork, and basing business decisions on guesswork is madness. On top of that it's a lot of wasted time and effort. Milestones and projections is a much more constructive approach, simply tracking the number of tasks in your backlog over time will give you an increasingly correct projection of when the project will be finished. link to this video
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hal-eisenon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Estimates are difficult for developers and product owners”

link to this video #NoEstimates Yes, be agile. Yes, measure all the things. But estimation sets everyone up for disappointment.
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