Art of Estimation–my thoughts

I read this post by Ian Battersby about estimation and started leaving a comment but it kept expanding so I decided to put it into a post.

Estimation is a very contentious area and fraught with pitfalls both inside and outside of the team.

In my experience developers aren't bad at doing estimating as long as they are fully aware of the domain, the codebase and the actual business requirement not necessarily what they've been asked to estimate, which of course we always know all the time.

A response to “Agility is not enough: Beyond the manifesto”

I recently came across this article by Steve Denning and within reading a few paragraphs I was disagreeing with the majority of what he was saying and I heard echo’s of management from years past, before I become a software developer, when I worked in sales and customer service.

My main point of disagreement, and possibly what Steve got push back on in his session, is around “delighting” the customer. Don’t get me wrong I want to be able to make my “customers” happy but as a software dev/team lead I have multiple customers to satisfy ranging from immediate and upper management through external clients to actual users of the software/website who may (or may not) be customers of the business.

I’ve not gone through Steve’s points in the order that he wrote them more in the order that I was most annoyed about what he had said, I will warn you now that is an extremely long post but hopefully worth the read, if you don’t have the time you could skip to the conclusion at the bottom and my rant .

Progressive.Net Tutorials

From September 5th to the 7th Skills Matter and London .Net user group are organising The 5th Progressive .NET Tutorials which are being held in at Skills Matter eXchange in London.

The tutorials are a series of twelve 4-hour hands-on Workshops which provide a deep dive into advanced topics for Agile .NET developers and I’m hosting one of the workshops!

My workshop is all about agile and given that I’ve got 4 hours you can be certain that I’m going to make sure everybody that attends will leave knowing why we use agile, what it gives us, the various methodologies currently used and the latest thoughts about what we could/should be doing.

If that wasn’t enough there are a whole host of other fantastic speakers: Christian Hassa, Gaspar Nagy, Ian Cooper, Sebastien Lambla, Dylan Beattie , Simon Brown, Paul Stack, Damjan Vujnovic, Adam Granicz, Ian Robinson, Mark Rendle, Steven Robbins, Jon Skeet and you can be sure that they’ll all be covering their respective subjects in great depth.

Unfortunately this isn’t a free event and it will cost you £425 for the 3 days but given that all the sessions are going to cover the subjects in great depth and hosted by experts in their fields hopefully you’ll think that its not a bad price for what you’ll learn.

For full details of the event and to register go here to the Skills Matter website.

Hopefully I’ll see you there but if not then keep up with what’s going on by following the hash tag #prognet on twitter leading up to and during the event.