Agile

It's a bit of an older article, but in particular, I loved the highlight on the loss of focus on delivering value toward how to make estimates better. Our job as devs is not to be the best estimators, but to be able to deliver business value quickly and consistently.

To me, the important thing in Real Agile is to pick the next few things to do, and do them promptly. The key question is to find the most valuable things to do, and to do them quickly. Doing them quickly comes down to doing small slices of high value, and iterating rapidly. Story cost estimation doesn’t help much with that, if at all.

So if the existence of an estimate causes management to take their eye off the ball of value and instead focus on improving estimates, it takes attention from the central purpose, which is to deliver real value quickly.

This makes me think that estimation, be it in points or time, is to be avoided.

A lot of people practicing Agile or Lean forget that what it primarily boils down to is a way to more quickly get value in front of customers, test their reactions and pivot accordingly.

Most organizations don’t test their innovation ideas with quick experiments to generate real-world evidence. Instead, they rely on in-house opinions, or conversations with lead customers to vet ideas. When data-driven experiments are run (like market surveys), they often take too long, cost too much or deliver little new insight to develop the idea.