I think estimates are wrong but useful and necessary. I don’t think it’s a strawman argument at all.
For simple activities you can get by with no estimates but with dependencies estimates become more and more necessary.
For simple activities you can get by with no estimates but with dependencies estimates become more and more necessary.
Beyond that, you’re metagaming and that is going to end up either not being worth the energy invested or a net negative. I say energy not time because there are only so many niggling arguments you can have with coworkers before they push you into traffic. Each petty little argument that could have been about something more important just runs down the clock.
I don’t think you need precise estimation down to the hour, but knowing if someone can do 4 things in a sprint or just 1 is really important because people have interdependencies.
I don’t think I’ve ever had arguments about estimates and it’s usually a really quick exercise of “I think this is a couple days” and others saying “ok.”
And on a larger team, a lot of these little things that need to be done could just be tasks rolled up into a maintenance story.
Of course when I was on a team doing Kanban none of this bullshit mattered. You just put it at the top of the backlog and it got done. Quick win, instant gratification, next story please.
And that right there is one of the biggest reasons Scrum is showing its age. It came into a world where quarterly milestones were the only time you found out how fucked the project is, and only then if you had a good bullshit detector. Otherwise it would be next quarter when you figured it out. It pushed that world down to two week resolution, one month to see past the BS. But it struggles to make good on reducing past 2 weeks. One week has more overhead, and forget about anything shorter than that.
Also I've never encountered anyone who followed Ken's advice to run sprints from Wednesday to Wednesday, so we always get the worst version of Scrum.
A big difference for what?
Usually, when someone insists on getting estimates, that's my way to make sure that they really need it. besides, it also helps making an estimate that won't be useless in the context of the decision to be made.
The lesson I learned from asking that is 1) many people ask for estimates without a clue about what they'll do with the info, and 2) when a decision actually needs to be made, the actual question is never "will it take 1 or 10 days", but rather "will that project be done by regulatory limit", or "will it cost 50k or 5 millions". And for the 2nd point, sizing every small task and adding up usually compounds uncertainty in unpredictable ways.
For projects it’s almost always a budget issue “how much money and time does it need?” And that’s important because, like money is hard to get and $1 is different than $2M. I think the time is usually related to money due to revenue and costs and whatnot.
My example was about estimating “how long to add a revert button to 5 pages” and that requires “db crud to revert stuff” so how long the latter takes affects when the former can start and if they can both make it into the same sprint. Etc etc
I've never been in a situation where adding db crud was its own user story. Usually, we group this and the button (and the metrics necessary to trask feature use) in a single item, and pair people so it can be shipped in one go.
I have personally only ever had success with estimates that were "is this a project, or is this a task that belongs to a project". Perhaps stretching to t-shirt sizing of S, M and L. Anything beyond that, say, comparing two projects to be able to prioritize and see the opportunity cost etc etc is a fool's errand.
From The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb:
[Critics say that] the maps we had were better than having no maps. [...] This is the strangest of errors.
I know few people who would board a plane heading for La Guardia airport in New York City with a pilot who was using a map of Atlanta’s airport “because there is nothing else.”
It is, however, possible to provide more information than "whatever" about how long it will take to achieve a goal. I have had goals I've worked on that were summarized with things like
- Could take anywhere between 2 days and 2 weeks, depending on factors
- Has an external dependency on X, and we don't have any insight into when X will be available
- May have other external dependencies, but we won't know until we're a few days into the work
- Not sure yet what the complexity of using <this API we need> is, so we'll need to check back in with more information once we have some time to experiment with it
- Expectation is about 5 days, on this, but it could be as short as 1.5, and could be as long as 3 weeks, depending on some factors
All of those things are more information than you had before, and allow the people that make decisions (which may be you and your team, or may be someone higher up the chain) to make _better_ decisions (or at least, better informed decisions)
And if you're working on something that you literally have no information on what's required for it, what the complexities might be, what the unknowns might be, etc... then perhaps the task you should be working on is "Identifying the work required to achieve <goal>", not "<goal>".
Unless you are working on ChatGPT-6, i assure you, you can definitely estimate how long things will take. your estimates will not be perfect, but they will be good approximations for guiding development.
Even OpenAI by now probably is pretty good at estimating how long the next ChatGPT version will take to develop, since they've done it 4-5 times already.
Alway always distrust someone who says "we are doing things that have never been done before". At the very bleeding edge (OpenAI, SpaceX), you are iterating on something that has been done many times before, but with a small innovation.
"never done before" in my experience usually translates to "this combination of things doesn't have precedence internally [to the team or company], so I have to figure out how to glue all of these parts I don't understand together".
If it is not the first time, then you already have the code and hence the time it takes is 0.
There are cases where code is similar to code you've written before or you cannot just copy the old one due to licensing constraints. In this case estimation is easy, somewhere between an hour to a day or two.
Anything larger can be broken down to hour to day or two chunks since it has been done before.
All great, except this last case simply doesn't exist for the type of work that I do. And that is true for many people, software is extremely unpredictable because the stuff you need to build on top of might as well be quicksand.
I’m a fan of Taleb, but also a fan of using good maps. Note that Taleb isn’t advocating no maps at all, just that it’s stupid to use the wrong map just because it exists.
I agree that I’d rather have no estimate than a bad estimate, but it’s not like those are the only two options. I want a good estimate or at least a useful estimate over nothing or bad.