Estimation Blackjack and Other Games: a Comedic Compendium
summary
Catalog of anti-patterns names common failure modes: Estimation Blackjack (people get penalized for higher estimates), Slot Machines (reveals stagger and bias), Solitaire, Charades and Dummy Bridge (missing people or specs), and Resistance (confident voices drown uncertainty). Recommends concrete fixes: use historical velocity (for one team: 45 points in two weeks), insist simultaneous reveals, treat uncertainty as a fact and take the high estimate, timebox discussion, and spike on it (example: a bug that looked like “two dots” turned out to be multibyte characters breaking a regex).
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chapters (17)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:06Meet Amy Younger
- 2:09Why estimating matters
- 7:08How we estimate
- 11:23Bad estimation games
- 12:04Solitaire estimating
- 13:36Charades estimating
- 15:21Dummy bridge estimating
- 16:23Slot machines estimating
- 18:53Estimation blackjack
- 23:05Resistance estimating
- 27:41Better estimates
- 28:04Estimation as part of job
- 29:28Respect uncertainty
- 31:01Concrete discussions
- 33:16Changing estimation
- 34:00Closing and Q&A
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