- Phenomenal talk
- Argues unequivocally that all estimates of time, effort and cost are unhelpful guesses that focus on the wrong thing and you should stop making them entirely
- In lean terms, all time spent estimating is waste because it does not help provide value to users
- While estimates are unhelpful, projections are necessary
- But projections are to help make two decisions early:
- Should we kill the project?
- Should we add people to the project?
- Estimates don’t warn you the project is in trouble until much later in the process
- To make projections, you simply need to count stories
- Story maps are the best planning tool: figure out the most important stories to make the software useful as quickly as possible, and do those first
Original video by Allen Holub:
This keynote presents my (and many other’s) thinking about. It argues that estimation is a bad thing, particularly in the Agile world, and presents ways to plan that don’t involve estimation.