No estimates - 10 new principles for testing

Editor's Notes

1. If you are bored with those endless estimation meetings
2. You are bored and demotivated by the long, low-value meetings that end in endless discussions about the size of features that are not yet fully defined.
3. If this is how it feels to present your estimates to your stakeholders
4. If you want to focus on making customers happy, instead of producing even more software
5. In 2014, JR Central reported that the Shinkansen's average delay from schedule per train was 54 seconds. This includes delays due to uncontrollable causes, such as natural disasters.[15] The record, in 1997, was 18 seconds. Their trick: Build a system that performs, don’t try to extract performance from an old system that was not built to perform.
6. In a waterfall project no one is in control at the end (show bug curve at the end). Much overtime will be needed to get this product out, and that will be on your backs and on the backs of the product development group (be it software or other complex product). This typically leads to a pattern that some have called “Death March” (concentration camp picture), and that’s how it feels. It feels like we are marching to a concentration camp (rant about lives destroyed by this approach). You have a responsibility to avoid this pattern in your place of work, and you can do it. Here’s how.
7. And this is only one of the reasons why Estimates don’t work. There are others.  Accidental Complication My friend JB Rainsberger talks about Accidental and Essential complication. In a short video available online he explains
8. We use relative estimates (story points), but… When was the last time that you worked on a perfect code base, where the cost of the accidental complication (how messy the code base was) was either zero or the same multiple of g(e) as when you implemented feature A? He concludes that often the cost of accidental complication – dealing with organizational and technical issues specific to that code, and that organization – dominates (yes, dominates!) the cost of a feature. So if Accidental complication dominates the cost of a feature, and it cannot be predicted, what does that say about Estimates? Here’s another reason why estimates fail….
9. Some people also take queuing very seriously…. (wait for reaction). I bet you do to. Have you fixed a bug that had been waiting for months in JIRA? So queues of work affect greatly the estimated time to complete. But wait time in queues are also unpredictable!
10. One question comes from understanding that what we are trying to do here is learning to live without trying to impose control on the development system. The fact is that what makes sense to do will change as up learn more. It does not help to set a target outside a system's capability. In other words, if a system is stable and reliably churning out a certain output, it is of no use to set higher (or lower) targets for that system. Conversely, if the system is not stable, setting a target is useless because you cannot predict reliably enough the output of the system. Let me give you an example. Remember Office Space the movie that came out in 1999 (what a fitting year) and starred Jenifer Aniston, Ron Livingston and others?  
11. Chaos report, 2004
12. Source: http://www.csus.edu/indiv/v/velianitis/161/ChaosReport.pdf eWork and eBusiness in Architecture, Engineering and Construction: ECPPM 2012
13. Sources: http:// people.senecac.on.ca/david.bath/BCS590/Powerpoints/05ch.ppt eWork and eBusiness in Architecture, Engineering and Construction: ECPPM 2012
14. Agile is alive and kicking. Take #NoEstimates and experiment! Be Agile!
15. What was the most successful project in this chart? Success is not linked to meeting your schedule
16. Agile is alive and kicking. Take #NoEstimates and experiment! Be Agile!
17. You come to the office and your boss catches you sitting down. ”You’re late Peter!” ”Oh sorry Mr Lumbergh. Traffic was really bad this morning, yeah” ”Sure, Peter. I’ll let this one slide. But say I would need you to deliver 10 stories in the next sprint. Do you think you can do that?” Did you see what he did just there?
18. Milton knows best how to react to this kind of situations.
19. Right, now back to the story. What Mr. Lumbergh did was Estimate Bargaining. Here’s what it means in practice….
20. This an example of what I call Estimate Bargaining, only one of the 4 Estimate Dysfunctions I describe in the NoEstimates book
21. One question comes from understanding that what we are trying to do here is learning to live without trying to impose control on the development system. The fact is that what makes sense to do will change as up learn more. It does not help to set a target outside a system's capability. In other words, if a system is stable and reliably churning out a certain output, it is of no use to set higher (or lower) targets for that system. Conversely, if the system is not stable, setting a target is useless because you cannot predict reliably enough the output of the system. Let me give you an example. Remember Office Space the movie that came out in 1999 (what a fitting year) and starred Jenifer Aniston, Ron Livingston and others?  
22. Let’s take a look at one example of how we can use #NoEstimates in a real project and what were the results...
23. Here are the questions that I started with...
24. Here are the questions that I started with...
25. Agile is alive and kicking. Take #NoEstimates and experiment! Be Agile!
26. Agile is alive and kicking. Take #NoEstimates and experiment! Be Agile!
27. Agile is alive and kicking. Take #NoEstimates and experiment! Be Agile!
28. Agile is alive and kicking. Take #NoEstimates and experiment! Be Agile!
29. Agile is alive and kicking. Take #NoEstimates and experiment! Be Agile!
30. Agile is alive and kicking. Take #NoEstimates and experiment! Be Agile!
31. Agile is alive and kicking. Take #NoEstimates and experiment! Be Agile!
32. Just last week – as if prepared on purpose for Oredev…