Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Is estimating a bad practice?

According to Naresh Jain, writing in response to a LinkedIn Agile Alliance discussion, it is:
Estimates are a hang-over from the waterfall world. For the last 6 years, I’ve been very happy and successful building products and delivering projects without all the estimation related ab-ra-ca-dab-ra. No more real-time, ideal-time, story point, function point; non-sense. I’ve realized the key is to focus on the flow of the deliverable and not whether your are delivering according to the estimates.
He goes on to make a pretty compelling case for the abolition of estimates (he provides some useful back-and-forth with his detractors in the comments, too). Since some of our teams have started down the kan-ban path, it would be interesting to know how much of our experience squares with Jain's claims.

Jain also references Joshua Kerievsky's Agile 2008 presentation on the same topic.

No comments: