Estimation

Have you ever lost track of time after saying to someone (your better half maybe?), it will only take a short while. Then suddenly dinner is cold and a couple of hours have passed, at least. Is this because you did not know how long time it would take to do the things you had planned. Maybe your definition of a short while is different than your better half's definition? Maybe the planned things where not the actual things you had to do anyway.. We estimate in our living life everyday, how long will it take me to get there, how long will I use to make dinner or how long will I use to answer these emails and send them.

It's a well known fact that we tend to be overly optimistic when we do estimation, especially if we are planning to perform the task ourselves.

In our team, we just started with planning poker. Before we did some estimation with post-it notes using numbers on them , but not all in the team where involved in the process. Before this we normally have the ones that where to implement the changes, estimate the time it took, without much discussion other than project manager adding to the estimate with test and administration time (yes most people forget about time to test).

Questions that often comes up is, who are doing the work? Normally I say that we estimate how long time the team will use on it, how long will it take us to implement this feature? Often someone know something the others do not and this makes this person able to perform the task faster. This does of course create an even wider gap between the people in the team. By estimating together with the planning poker cards we open up for others to more easily try themselves on tasks they normally would not be able to get because someone in the team where better at that type of technology than they are. By this I mean that the estimate opens up for other people to have a chance on making it within the estimate. This makes the team much better suited for the day that one team member leave the team or call in sick. We are then actually still able to perform the task with less problem than if noone had ever touched a similar task or that specific technology.

Questions I want people to think about is:
How long time does it actually take? What is the estimate used for? Do we need the estimate?

These questions put a big questionmark behind the word estimation. Normally in our case the estimate is used for giving the customer a rough idea of the cost. Can this really be turned around as many people talk about in the "agile community", are we able to get the customer to come to us and tell us how much they want to use on the new functionality. Do we have enough trust to deliver what we can in the time we have available. With the Scrum approach we surely would be able to do the important tasks first, but is it enough?

Another question that shows up is how long does the estimation take? Maybe much of the estimation we do should be considered as a waste of time. David J Anderson has some nice words regarding that perspective here.