The key to solving the conundrum of software estimation
summary
A concrete claim: trust trumps tooling — when estimates go wrong the visible cause is often a broken relationship, not the lack of story points or Monte Carlo runs. Examples include a CTO pushing delivery dates and adding people, a project delivered at great cost with most of the team leaving, and subsequent deliberate over‑inflation of estimates. Actual tools tried: T‑shirt sizing, spikes, Cocomo, Monte Carlo, NoEstimates. Practical prescriptions: focus on sprints, be transparent about misses, teach commerciality and empathy, and use vivid analogies like the cantilevered swimming pool to explain uncertainty.
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chapters (6)
- 0:00Start
- 2:56Software Estimation Is Hard
- 6:46Key Ingredient to Solving the Conundrum of Software Estimation Is Trust
- 7:54Focus on Your Sprints
- 9:23Educate Them on the Complexity of Software Estimation
- 9:58Why Solving the Conundrum of Software Estimation Is Not Merely an Academic Exercise
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