Agile Estimating and Planning

Nothing yet!
Nothing yet!

Highlights

  • Agile developers essentially say: We will give you a plan based on what we know today; we will adapt the plan to meet your most critical objective; we will adapt the project and our plans as we both move forward and learn new information; we expect you to understand what you are asking for—that flexibility to adapt to changing business conditions and absolute conformance to original plans are incompatible objectives.
  • Many traditional planners don’t understand a key concept—you can’t “plan” away uncertainty. Plans are based on what we know at a given point in time. Uncertainty is another way of expressing what we don’t know—about the ends or the means.
  • For most uncertainties (lack of knowledge) the only way to reduce the uncertainty and gain knowledge is to execute—to do something, to build something, to simulate something—and then get feedback.
  • Many project management approaches appear to be “plan, plan, plan-do.” Agile approaches are “plan-do-adapt,” “plan-do-adapt.”
  • Throughout a project, the team is generating new capabilities in the product. They are also generating new knowledge—about the product, the technologies in use, and themselves as a team.
  • If I were to define a failed project, one of my criteria would certainly be “a project on which no one came up with any better ideas than what was on the initial list of requirements.”
  • Obviously, though, we can rarely wait twenty years for a system, and so we engage teams. A team of thirty may spend a year (thirty person-years) developing what a lone programmer could have done in twenty. The development cost goes up, but the value of having the application nineteen years earlier justifies the increased cost.
  • Far too often a plan is reduced to a single date, and all of the assumptions and expectations that led to that date are forgotten.
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© 2025 Alessandro Desantis