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“Definitions of #NoEstimates”? An enumerated list of counterpoints, Part I.

A week or two ago, we saw the first interesting new blog post on the bizarre and rancorous #NoEstimates movement in quite some time. Although that post is titled “definitions of #NoEstimates”, it’s not really “definitions” per se; it seems instead to be more of a mixed list of NE approaches (sometimes contradictory, as the author himself notes) and miscellaneous arguments that have been frequently made in favor of the movement. To the best of my knowledge, no such overall compilation has ever been made by a #NoEstimates proponent; as such, I applaud Jay Bazuzi for putting it together.

Of course, each of the described approaches/arguments has been outlined (and countered) individually many times before. But as far as I know, none of the major NE advocates has ever actually addressed any of the counterpoints to them, choosing instead just to block and insult the people making those counterpoints, often boasting proudly that they do so to “filter out the noise”.

In any case, let’s centralize those counterpoints now: here’s an item-by-item recap, springboarding off of Jay’s enumerated list of #NoEstimates approaches. For reasons of space and manageability, I’m splitting this rundown of counterpoints into two separate posts. Here goes: [Read more…]

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Quocknipucks, or, why story points make sense. Part 1.

A long time ago, before most people (including me) had ever heard of the concept of story points, I came in as the CTO at a major social networking site. The dev team, even though staffed with a lot of excellent developers, had experienced enormous historical difficulty in delivering according to expectations, theirs or anyone else’s. People both inside and outside of the team complained that the team wasn’t delivering big projects on a timely basis, plus there were a lot of small-but-important items that never got done because the team was focused on larger work.

What’s the team’s capacity, I asked? How much can it reasonably take on before it becomes too much? How do we viably fit in smaller items along with the major initiatives, instead if it being an either/or? No one really knew, or even had thought much about what seemed like natural (even mandatory) questions to be asking.

At the time, I declared that it seemed like we just needed some abstract unit of capacity (I jokingly proposed the first Carrollian word that popped into my head: Quocknipucks) that could be used to help us “fill up the jar” with work items, large and small, without overfilling it. Each item would be valued in terms of its number of Quocknipucks, representing some approximation of size, and we’d come up with a total team capacity for a given time frame by using the same invented Quocknipuck units, which we would adjust as we gained experience with the team, the platform, the flow.

Little did I know that I was independently coming up with the basic idea behind story points. Interestingly, the term I chose was deliberately whimsical, to separate the concept from things in the real world like the actual amount of time needed for any particular item.

Here’s what I’ll argue: the basic idea behind story points is sound, and useful; yet, somehow a certain set of Agilists has now come to reject story points entirely, even referring to them (wrong-headedly and quite overstated) as “widely discredited”.

[Read more…]

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IT and baseball: no silver heuristics

Along the lines of my last post that discussed avoiding slogans and “lazy thinking” in IT, let’s talk about the increasingly popular word “heuristic”. I think we can all agree that developing software is anything but simplistic. So why aren’t we more skeptical when people propose adopting simplistic heuristics for developing software? Let’s look more closely at this manner of thinking, with a specific example.

In a recent exchange, a #NoEstimates advocate declared that one example of someone making a decision amidst uncertainty, without estimating, was the act of catching a fly ball. My response was that there are in fact many estimates involved in that activity, whereupon the #NoEstimates advocate put forth essentially the notion that a fielder uses the following heuristic instead:

“One good way to catch a fly ball is to hold up your gloved hand at a constant angle, and run so that the falling fly ball is directly aligned with your glove. If the fly ball appears above your glove, it is going to go over your head: move back. If it appears below your glove, it is going to fall in front of you: move forward. Left of glove: move left. Right: move right.”

But really: watch any major league baseball game and look for a single instance, just one, where the outfielder is doing anything even vaguely resembling the above. (However, one can certainly conjure up the specter of hapless Little Leaguers, coached in this #NoEstimates heuristic-driven technique, desperately waving their gloves back and forth in front of their faces, flinching while fly balls thud to the ground all around them). You won’t find a real-world example of the above-described heuristic, because using just that heuristic will not lead you to predictable success in catching most fly balls. [Read more…]

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