NoEstimates – Simple Oriented Architecture

Books, Process

Book Review: No Estimates

As I’ve said in a previous post, I don’t like estimating. So I decided to have a look at Vasco Duarte‘s No Estimates book.

While reading this book, I had 4 questions in mind:

Why are estimates waste?
What questions do estimates try to answer?
What to use instead for story estimation?
What to use instead for project estimation (e.g. for bids)?

So, let’s first have a look at the book and then we’ll see how it helped me answer these questions.

Process

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.