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Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?

#21

The highest performing teams I have been a part of did not regularly do estimates for planned work. That may be the best practice for 2021. If we had to absolutely deliver by a fixed date - a rarity - we broke the task down in parts that could be estimated, identified the dependencies between tasks, and kept management informed if those dates could slip. This lightweight process worked pretty well if we had to implem…

Can you tell more? I would be interested how you can get management to let go of regular estimations, and how you still delivered.

Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?

#22
We do No Estimates because we just stopped somehow to estimate tickets some years ago and it didn’t bothered us. We have no real value of what is the time to do a ticket but we know how many of them our team can achieve during a sprint and that’s enough.

We naturally learned to slice « too big » tickets and we roughly define « too big » by « I’ll probably struggle on this ».

It’s far from perfect, not really better but absolutely not worse than when we did estimates and we are able to achieve our goals, which is what matters.

Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?

#24
Lots of schools of thoughts. I'm personal very adamant about light-weight process around story-points and sprints. I've found it's the most reliable way to manage expectations external to the team and help the team drive to clarity.

On some teams, we're trending towards "story-count" rather than points. These teams are typically executing extremely well and don't need the (small) overhead of points.

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John Cutler has some good thinking on this issue: https://medium.com/hackernoon/work-small-even-if-it-makes-no...

Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?

#26
post #15

The below is a joke, but sadly it is representative of most teams I have worked on. If it's like anything that most managers do, you have the team come up with estimates, have some meetings to see if you missed anything, discover that you did, then create a schedule, remembering to add slack time for unforeseen interruptions due to people getting sick, customer issues, etc. Then you see that the schedule is too long.…

Where is the joke? This sound like SOP.

Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?

#27
Estimating a task and estimating a program of work are completely different things. Task estimation is only ever accurate in aggregate. If you can estimate free of outside influence (ie gaming the system) then you can assume an equal amount of over and underestimation making week by week velocity relatively stable. Outliers happen no matter what. Estimating a program is mostly futile. Not because task estimation is impossible but because project requirements are moving target. That's pretty much the whole point of agile. Ability to adjust to changing priorities comes at the cost of predictability but it's a worthy tradeoff because building the right thing trumps everything else. You can measure your completed backlog against the outstanding backlog to get an idea of progress and forecast when you'll hit the 37th next priority but that isn't necessarily going to the day that you're "done" because priorities shift.

Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?

#28

The highest performing teams I have been a part of did not regularly do estimates for planned work. That may be the best practice for 2021. If we had to absolutely deliver by a fixed date - a rarity - we broke the task down in parts that could be estimated, identified the dependencies between tasks, and kept management informed if those dates could slip. This lightweight process worked pretty well if we had to implem…

Can you tell more? I would be interested how you can get management to let go of regular estimations, and how you still delivered.

Upper management should be ok with estimates expressed in sprints.

As long as your team manages to finish sprints, it doesn’t matter how you are estimating (or not) the tasks inside of a sprint.

Sprint tasks are for internal (team) use only, including the management inside the team. But people outside (and up) the team just need your deadline commitment.

Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?

#29
Don't estimate. They don't matter and nobody cares about them anyway. If you're a sales driven/feature factory company, the estimates won't matter anyway as you'll demand to meet your obligations regardless of estimates.

If you're a company that plans far in advance, the same is true. You'll demand the work you wanted is done at a given date, again regardless of how difficult it was.

At my company, we have a well maintained backlog of work. We pick dates in the future to check in on what got done in between check ins. The product manager can (re)prioritize work as needed. We pull from the top. If there's a surprise deadline it gets brought up to everyone and then put at the top of the queue, sometimes over currently in-progress tasks.

You cannot bend the realities of time and complexity. If something is hard, an estimate doesn't make it easier. A hard delivery date also doesn't bring predictability. Ultimately, with or without estimates, you'll get what you get. If you want to get _more_, ask a team what's making them slow and then prioritize fixing the things they bring up. If every team is working optimally (they're not), hire.

I'll also add, the time it takes to prepare an estimate of any value is probably 10x what anybody asking you to estimate something is willing to provide. You're being asked to spit out a number to fit an existing narrative. If you wanted to estimate a unit of work with any amount of legitimacy, you'd need hours/days/weeks (depending on SOW). These companies scheduling weekly estimation meetings that last an hour and are bullshit scrum cards don't matter and aren't interested in being even close to correct.

Re: Ask HN: How do you do estimates in 2021?

#30

The highest performing teams I have been a part of did not regularly do estimates for planned work. That may be the best practice for 2021. If we had to absolutely deliver by a fixed date - a rarity - we broke the task down in parts that could be estimated, identified the dependencies between tasks, and kept management informed if those dates could slip. This lightweight process worked pretty well if we had to implem…

Can you tell more? I would be interested how you can get management to let go of regular estimations, and how you still delivered.

> I would be interested how you can get management to let go of regular estimations,

They have to convince themselves.

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