Some people love to spout a law, rule or formula to validate their opinion or explain a situation. Problem is, I can’t remember which law is which or the difference between various rules. So, for a few weeks, we are posting brief explanations of the most common ones. This week… Read More »It’s the law: Hofstadter’s law
As regulars will know, we have been discussing estimating and forecasting quite a lot over the last few years. There are some marvellous books out there but one thing we found absent was a straightforward, practical review of the various techniques used for estimation and forecasting. So, we decided to… Read More »NEW estimating and forecasting workshop
If you’re a regular to scrumandkanban.co.uk, you’ll know that James and I have been talking about estimation and forecasting quite a bit. We’ve also run a few experiments on the topic. Two books in particular have raised interesting ideas. Firstly, Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds talked about how crowds can beat… Read More »Our summer experiment
Turns out, averaging does not mean dumbing down. If you want a smart decision, you’re actually better off asking a group than trying to find the expert. I’ve been reading a lot about estimation and forecasting over the last few years, and one of the most referred to books is… Read More »The wisdom of crowds
Introduction In 1908, a guy at Guinness found a way to measure which types of barley produced the best beer-brewing yields: he called it the “t-statistic”. However, because Guinness was paranoid about giving away trade secrets, he had to publish his ideas under the pseudonym “Student”. Although we now know… Read More »Student’s t-statistic
Probabilistic forecasting is an alternative to an estimates based approach. Rather than asking your teams to break down a lot of work up front, and then estimate it, we can use past data generated by the team from the work they’ve already done to extrapolate a forecast of what may happen… Read More »Probabilistic Forecasting
“Don’t assume your customers think like you” “Don’t assume your customers think like you” is my number one piece of advice for anyone starting a new business. It was one of the critical errors I made in 2004 that resulted in my first start-up failing and still holds true today.… Read More »When words go bad
Or is it? It’s not so much the act of estimation that’s the issue. Relative sizing can be a useful tool to help teams gain a shared understanding of a work item, and as a barometer for keeping batch size small. It’s what we do with those numbers afterwards that… Read More »To estimate, or not to estimate: That is the question.
“I don’t like the word commitment”, started Bob in a retrospective, “I don’t feel it’s fair that I’m promising the business the delivery of something that I have no control over [because there was work in the sprint that Bob would not be working on]. I’d prefer to use a… Read More »Commitment issues
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