Estimation Isn’t for Everyone

<p>As an engineering manager, I once led a traditional Scrum team, living the mainstream Agile culture. We spent hours defining, refining, and estimating work so that we could feed it into our fine-tuned productivity machine. We were all veterans of Agile Scrum &mdash; so why did it seem like this machine wasn&rsquo;t as fine-tuned as we thought?</p> <p>&ldquo;Ro-sham-bo, throw!&rdquo; our Scrum Master would shout, as fingertip estimates darted into the air. Inevitably, a few of those numbers would match, a few wouldn&rsquo;t, and then the discussion would really kick off.</p> <p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;ll take a week,&rdquo; an astute engineer would offer.</p> <p>&ldquo;Ah-ah! That&rsquo;s a measure of time and not complexity,&rdquo; I would remind the group. We would then take time to recite the ethos of complexity points, before revisiting the all-too-familiar topic of developer capabilities as they related to the estimate. Back and forth we&rsquo;d go, always talking about how we described the work, rather than the actual work itself.</p> <p><a href="https://open.nytimes.com/estimation-isnt-for-everyone-a72484f88b27">Visit Now</a></p>