Agile estimating and planning

Agile estimating and planning techniques are a combined subject that holds particular interest for me. Over time, I've experimented with various techniques and some worked better than others. Estimation is always a lot of 'fun'! How many times do project managers, stakeholders, indeed whole corporations expect estimations to be accurate within a neglible tolerance? Too often. Worse still, they hold you to the original estimates even when they've been empirically modified. But planning is where i see it all go wrong too often, and sadly usually from the outset. Whether it be as simple as not employing adaptive planning techniques where plans consequently take root and become inflexible and pointless, or more subtly because of the way the problem domain or user stories are disaggregated to produce an emerging design with low cohesion and tight coupling.

So i was particularly excited when Mike Cohn started the agileplanning group to review and discuss the draft material for his forthcoming book: Agile Estimating and Planning. It was both fun and educational reviewing Mike's evolving work and offering feedback. And hearing the ideas and input from other members of the group. The content of the book is very rich and serves as a toolkit of techniques for adaptive planning and empirical estimation within the larger context of agile software development. I definitely recommend purchasing a copy of this book when it is published by Prentice Hall in September 2005.

Mike made my day, today. He asked permission to quote me on the subject of iteration length, a subject which came up in one of the many threads that had run in the group. Of course, without hesitation i wholeheartedly gave my consent. Here's the quote:

"Like a heart beats with a regularity that keeps the body going, a fixed iteration duration provides a constant which helps establish a development (and delivery) rhythm. Rhythm in my experience is a significant factor that helps achieve a sustained pace."

Innocuous really, but it's nice to be quoted nevertheless.

I made a post to this blog around the same time titled Fixed iteration length.

posted by Simon Baker @ permalink
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