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Showing posts from November, 2017

Better estimates: Trivariate Estimation.

Tell me if this story sounds familiar. You sit in yet another meeting. Listen to business stakeholders talk about what they want. Then you're straight into another meeting where you sit down to come up with an estimate. Eventually you emerge and present it to the business stakeholders. They take this number as fact, as a concrete answer for how long this piece of work will take. Of course in the end the number is not representative of reality. Someone gets upset, because you’ve gone over budget, missed a deadline or simply because reality didn't match with the image in their head. Postmortems are done. The next project starts and the cycle repeats. Eventually people start padding estimates. The whole process breeds distrust, distrust kills teams. Familiar? I thought so. What can we do about it? As an industry we’ve tried a few things. Solutions such as estimating in comparative complexity units like story points hasn't solved this problem, nor has only having experie