It’s been over three years now since I published a lengthy dismantling of the very bizarre “No Estimates” movement. My four-part series on the movement marched methodically and thoroughly through the issues surrounding NoEstimates — e.g., what common sense tells us about estimating in life and business, reasons why estimation is useful, specific responses to the major NoEstimates arguments, and a wrap-up that in part dealt with the peculiar monoculture (including the outright verbal abuse frequently directed by NoEstimates advocates at critics) that pervades the world of NoEstimates. I felt my series was specific and comprehensive enough so that I saw no reason (and still see no reason) to write further lengthy posts countering the oft-repeated NoEstimates points; I’ve already addressed them not just thoroughly, but (it would seem) unanswerably, given that there has been essentially no substantive response to those points from NoEstimates advocates.
However, the movement shows little signs of abating, particularly via the unflagging efforts of at least two individuals who seem to be devoted to evangelizing it full-time through worldwide paid workshops, conference presentations, etc. Especially at conferences attended primarily by developers, the siren song that “estimates are waste” is ever-compelling, it seems. Even though NoEstimates advocates apparently have no answer to (and hence basically avoid discussion of) the various specific objections to their ideas that people have raised, they continue to pull in a developer audience to their many strident presentations of the NoEstimates sales pitch.
So here’s my take: the meaty parts of the topic, the core arguments related to estimates, have indeed long been settled — NoEstimates advocates have barely ventured to pose either answers or substantive (non-insult) objections to the major counterpoints that critics have raised. For the last several years, then, the sole hallmark of the NoEstimates controversy has actually not been the what, but rather the how, of how the NoEstimates advocates present it: its tone, rhetoric, and (ill)logic.
With that in mind, it’s time to deconstruct a NoEstimates conference talk in detail. There are several such talks I could have done this with (see the annotated list at the end of this post), but I decided to choose the most recent one available, despite its considerable flaws. And by “deconstruct”, I’m going to look primarily at issues of gamesmanship and sheer rhetoric — in other words, I won’t take time or space to rehash the many weaknesses of the specific NoEstimates arguments themselves. As I’ve stated, those weaknesses have been long addressed, and you can refer to their full discussion here.
I’m arguing that at this point, the key learning to be had from the otherwise fairly futile and sadly rancorous NoEstimates debate is actually no longer about the use of estimates or even about software development itself, but really more about the essence of how to argue any controversial case, in general, effectively and appropriately. It’s an area where IT/development people are often deficient, and a notable case example of that is the flawed way that some of those people argue for faddish, unsupportable ideas like NoEstimates.
The NoEstimates conference talk that I’ll deconstruct here, given at the Path To Agility conference in 2017, is characteristic: in particular, it starts out setting its own stage for a “them against us” attitude; then, it relies on:
- straw man arguments and logical leaps
- selective and skewed redefinitions of words
- misquoting of experts
- citing of dubious “data” in order to imbue the NoEstimates claims with an aura of legitimacy.
