I suck at estimating! But it seems that our industry considers estimating an important skill. I’ve always been optimist with my estimates. And being aware of this hasn’t made my estimates more accurate. (Apparently there’s event a law for this – Hofstadter’s law). The truth is, I never wanted to get better at it. And I still don’t.

Why?

First of all, estimates are waste (from a lean point of view). If you ask a customer: “Do you want more estimations?”, he’ll say no. This means that estimates are waste.

Of course, there are different types of estimates. There are rough order of magnitude estimations for large chunks of work. Let’s call this Estimating a project. Then there’s estimating smaller pieces of work, for example Estimating stories or features.

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