Estimating and Planning
Wednesday, December 27th, 2006Christmas is wonderful time for reading. You don’t have anything more meaningful to do anyway 
Mike Cohn‘s Agile Estimating and Planning happened to be on top of my reading stack. What a wonderful book it is! It stroke right into my thinking about conscious development. He provided excellent advice on estimating projects, prioritizing features, planning projects, planning iterations, calculating benefits, communicating progress, scheduling etc.
Most often these things are either done hastily or not at all. But you really have to do them, and do them consciously.
Most projects contain a tremendous amount of uncertainty. This uncertainty is often not fully reflected in the schedules and deadlines that project teams create. There are times when this uncertainty is so large or significant that extra steps should be taken when estimating the duration of a project.
The bottomline is this:
- You have to be able to justify any user story / project
- Do the planning, make the plans visible, and change them as needed
- Admit the uncertainty there is and plan for it
- Make wise estimates don’t just have a guess
Highly recommended to everyone! Really, I can’t say is this book for developers or managers. It gives excellent advice for project managers and project owners on prioritizing features, on the other hand, it says a lot about estimating the size of a user story – an activity best done by a developer.
It matches my thinking: there should be no project managers, developers and customer – there should be unified teams. And this book is excellent reading for a team!