<story><title>Agile won the war but lost the peace</title><url>https://www.allankellyassociates.co.uk/archives/2762/agile-won-the-war-but-lost-the-peace/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TheOtherHobbes</author><text>If you set aside 6 weeks and it takes 12, you suck at estimating. Not only are you likely to ship a broken product, but you also have no way of making intelligent business decisions about possible projects.&lt;p&gt;Project A will bring in $X. You estimate 6 weeks. It takes 12. Project B will bring in $Y. You estimate 6 weeks. It takes 7. If X is similar to Y and you bet on the wrong horse, you&amp;#x27;ve dented and&amp;#x2F;or sunk your cash flow for no reason.&lt;p&gt;Saying &amp;quot;Humans suck at estimating&amp;quot; is nonsense. It&amp;#x27;s a skill that can easily be improved - usually at the cost of some up front planning - and there are plenty of resources to help you with that.&lt;p&gt;The real problem with Agile is that it gives management an excuse to do no estimation at all. Some alpha-wannabe manager bangs their fist on a desk and says &amp;quot;I want this in three weeks&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Instead of saying &amp;quot;You&amp;#x27;re insane&amp;quot; teams are pressured into trying to make up for someone else&amp;#x27;s laziness and lack of contact with reality.</text></item><item><author>yebyen</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve been reading &amp;quot;It Doesn&amp;#x27;t Have to be Crazy at Work&amp;quot; and they have a chapter about this.  Deadlines are great!  Estimates are terrible, and humans are terrible at estimating.  Scope needs to be elastic to accommodate this fact of life.&lt;p&gt;If the project is not done in the 6 weeks you set aside for it, just ship something anyways and move on.  It was only worth 6 weeks when you planned on getting it done in 6 weeks, so why spend more?  Go ahead and plan another sprint if it turns out what you were able to build in the time allocated wasn&amp;#x27;t enough, and you really need more.  (Put it up against the other opportunities you have, and give them all a fair chance at those finite development resources, something else might also turn out to be more important.)&lt;p&gt;Just don&amp;#x27;t spend forever and drag out the deadline, throwing off the timeline for whatever you had planned to do next, because you needed more time for the thing that underestimated how big it was, so it wasn&amp;#x27;t really possible to do that whole thing in only 6 weeks.&lt;p&gt;The release that is reduced in scope might be totally insufficient, or, it might be just what your users needed!  The knife also cuts both ways – if you&amp;#x27;re willing to accept that project scope can change in either direction, you can occasionally deliver things early too.&lt;p&gt;I really like everything about this book.</text></item><item><author>umvi</author><text>In defense of sprints, not everyone is the same. Deadlines for me are a strong motivation to get things done, whereas &amp;quot;no deadline, just do it at your own pace until it&amp;#x27;s done&amp;quot; will cause me to procrastinate and get it done much more slowly.&lt;p&gt;There is no silver bullet for software development process. It takes hard work and flexibility to optimize your team&amp;#x27;s work flow.</text></item><item><author>brightball</author><text>Sprints are where all of the issues with agile really come from. Constant arbitrary, meaningless deadlines that serve no purpose but create rushes, tech debt, missed “commitments” that serve as a meaningless metric to use against teams while made commitments give no benefit.&lt;p&gt;Everything around sprints to try to avoid the negatives results in huge wastes of time in meetings attempting to plan better rather than actually getting work done.&lt;p&gt;Sprint are the root cause. Just use Kanban and you eliminate most of your problems.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>coldtea</author><text>&amp;gt;&lt;i&gt;Saying &amp;quot;Humans suck at estimating&amp;quot; is nonsense.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;And yet it&amp;#x27;s the conclusion every major thinker (and practicer) in our field has come to (plus there&amp;#x27;s historical evidence from tons of mis-estimated projects, regardless of scope and budget).&lt;p&gt;So, whether does the idea that it&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;a skill that can easily be improved&amp;quot; come from? Wishful thinking? I don&amp;#x27;t think the universe works that way.&lt;p&gt;Sure, you can learn to be less widely off. But you can&amp;#x27;t never learn to be regularly correct at estimating, or even close within a small margin.&lt;p&gt;At best, what happens is that quality get shitty and corners get cut, and you get the product at the correct deadline, but it&amp;#x27;s not the same that you wanted to ship before development started (even if the features are nominally there).</text></comment>
<story><title>Agile won the war but lost the peace</title><url>https://www.allankellyassociates.co.uk/archives/2762/agile-won-the-war-but-lost-the-peace/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TheOtherHobbes</author><text>If you set aside 6 weeks and it takes 12, you suck at estimating. Not only are you likely to ship a broken product, but you also have no way of making intelligent business decisions about possible projects.&lt;p&gt;Project A will bring in $X. You estimate 6 weeks. It takes 12. Project B will bring in $Y. You estimate 6 weeks. It takes 7. If X is similar to Y and you bet on the wrong horse, you&amp;#x27;ve dented and&amp;#x2F;or sunk your cash flow for no reason.&lt;p&gt;Saying &amp;quot;Humans suck at estimating&amp;quot; is nonsense. It&amp;#x27;s a skill that can easily be improved - usually at the cost of some up front planning - and there are plenty of resources to help you with that.&lt;p&gt;The real problem with Agile is that it gives management an excuse to do no estimation at all. Some alpha-wannabe manager bangs their fist on a desk and says &amp;quot;I want this in three weeks&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Instead of saying &amp;quot;You&amp;#x27;re insane&amp;quot; teams are pressured into trying to make up for someone else&amp;#x27;s laziness and lack of contact with reality.</text></item><item><author>yebyen</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve been reading &amp;quot;It Doesn&amp;#x27;t Have to be Crazy at Work&amp;quot; and they have a chapter about this.  Deadlines are great!  Estimates are terrible, and humans are terrible at estimating.  Scope needs to be elastic to accommodate this fact of life.&lt;p&gt;If the project is not done in the 6 weeks you set aside for it, just ship something anyways and move on.  It was only worth 6 weeks when you planned on getting it done in 6 weeks, so why spend more?  Go ahead and plan another sprint if it turns out what you were able to build in the time allocated wasn&amp;#x27;t enough, and you really need more.  (Put it up against the other opportunities you have, and give them all a fair chance at those finite development resources, something else might also turn out to be more important.)&lt;p&gt;Just don&amp;#x27;t spend forever and drag out the deadline, throwing off the timeline for whatever you had planned to do next, because you needed more time for the thing that underestimated how big it was, so it wasn&amp;#x27;t really possible to do that whole thing in only 6 weeks.&lt;p&gt;The release that is reduced in scope might be totally insufficient, or, it might be just what your users needed!  The knife also cuts both ways – if you&amp;#x27;re willing to accept that project scope can change in either direction, you can occasionally deliver things early too.&lt;p&gt;I really like everything about this book.</text></item><item><author>umvi</author><text>In defense of sprints, not everyone is the same. Deadlines for me are a strong motivation to get things done, whereas &amp;quot;no deadline, just do it at your own pace until it&amp;#x27;s done&amp;quot; will cause me to procrastinate and get it done much more slowly.&lt;p&gt;There is no silver bullet for software development process. It takes hard work and flexibility to optimize your team&amp;#x27;s work flow.</text></item><item><author>brightball</author><text>Sprints are where all of the issues with agile really come from. Constant arbitrary, meaningless deadlines that serve no purpose but create rushes, tech debt, missed “commitments” that serve as a meaningless metric to use against teams while made commitments give no benefit.&lt;p&gt;Everything around sprints to try to avoid the negatives results in huge wastes of time in meetings attempting to plan better rather than actually getting work done.&lt;p&gt;Sprint are the root cause. Just use Kanban and you eliminate most of your problems.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lacey</author><text>Do you have specific resources you would recommend for learning to produce better estimates?&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m also curious what kind of work you do that you find estimating effort to be reliable, and what kind of tracking you do to keep yourself honest (e.g. I often see people say something will take two weeks and the only reason it happens in two weeks is they end up working day and night for the last 5-7 days when they realize that&amp;#x27;s what it&amp;#x27;s going to take to make it happen).</text></comment>