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When it comes to estimating, the odds are stacked against us. (Think: Planning Fallacy.) But we can tip the scales in our favour. Here are 3 ways. = = = = = = = = = = = = New for 2024: my best-ever training: "How Your Agile Teams Can Achieve Predictability and Productivity WITHOUT Burnout" → https://www.developmentthatpays.com/webinars/p-and-p?ref=yt = = = = = = = = = = = = Download your FREE CHEAT SHEET: https://www.developmentthatpays.com/cheatsheets/agile-estimating ------------------- 122. 3 Keys to Better Agile Estimates # #DevelopmentThatPays Key #1: Get multiple estimates from different people ----- Get multiple estimates. Ideally, from different people To err is human; but we can average out the “errs” by estimating in a team. I think this makes sense intuitively: If we ask a group of 5 people to estimate the weight of a locomotive and get these results: 60 140 120 120 80 We could average them out (60 + 140 + 120 + 120 + 80)/5 = 104 Which isn’t far off. But things don’t always work out so cleanly. Now that this group is warmed up, let’s test them again: “How long does it take to get from Paris to Brussels ” (it’s a question we’ve asked before. And if you saw last week’s episode, you know that I am - quite literally - asking for trouble.) Here are the estimates: 4 hours 1 hour 2 hours 2 hours 4 days Whoa… that’s quite a range: 1 hour to 4 days! 4 days is 96 hours. That’s a range of very nearly 2 orders of magnitude. Huge! What’s wrong with these people What’s going on inside their heads Let’s take a look: The person that said 1 hour was thinking of going by aeroplane. The person that said 4 days was thinking of going by bike 4 hours: driving. 2 hours: train. Makes sense 2 hours: aeroplane. Interesting: this person has factored-in the time to get to the airport which is sits north of Paris. 5 people estimating... 5 entirely different things! Which brings us to the second key: Key #2 - Use Objective Measures ------ What if we asked them a different question: “How FAR is it from Paris to Brussels ” The results are in: 150 miles 200 miles 260 miles 180 miles 220 miles This time the answers are in board agreement: they all of the same order of magnitude. An estimate of 2,000 would be one order of magnitude different; 2 orders of magnitude would be 20,000 miles. Which will get you most of the way around the earth! If we look inside their heads... Looks like everyone’s looking at the problem in the same way: everyone is using the same basis for their estimate. It’s an OBJECTIVE measure. That’s In contrast to the SUBJECTIVE measure we started with: travel time. When we’re estimating in software development, we want to avoid “development time” - which is a SUBJECTIVE measure. Instead, we want an OBJECTIVE measure. And the unit of measure of this “objective measure” is the Story Point. Here’s a definition from Mike Cohn: “Story points are a unit of measure for expressing an estimate of the overall effort that will be required to fully implement a product backlog item or any other piece of work.” So it’s a measure of the effort required to build, test and release the Feature or story. Mike goes on to say: “Because story points represent the effort to develop a story, a team’s estimate must include everything that can affect the effort. That could include: The amount of work to do The complexity of the work Any risk or uncertainty in doing the work At the risk of stretching an analogy to breaking point… we could say similar things about a map. The amount of work to do… is like distance The complexity… is like the terrain - which is another thing And uncertainty or risk… Okay… now I’m struggling… areas of political unrest. Let’s move on… We’ve still one more key to get to. As we touched on last time, the originators of Story Points felt the need to bring a new unit of measure into the world because other non-time unit of measure candidates - lines of code, function count, number of commits - were too easy to fake. But they’ve given us a measure that is ABSTRACT - you can’t look up the size of a Story Point. However… the absolute size of a Story Point doesn’t matter. The reason for that is a consequence of our third and final rule. Key #3 - Use Relative estimates (if possible) ------ Sorry people; maps again! The team we started with did a pretty good job of estimating the distance from Paris to Brussels. But everyone on the the team was either from France or Belgium. And none of them have been to the USA So this time I’m going to take them right out of their comfort zone: “How far is it from San Francisco to Los Angeles ” They are going to struggle. Would it help to see a map Yes, bu https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gxf76eGyG5c&list=PLngnoZX8cAn-9tWYxyQQPGoHW7DETBCjK