Estimating your way to success - Rod Begbie, LeadDev

This resource first appeared in issue #63 on 26 Feb 2021 and has tags Technical Leadership: Other, Strategy: Project Management

Estimating gets a bad rep because our estimates… aren’t very good. The future isn’t knowable! But Begbie reminds us that the purpose of estimation isn’t to get perfect duration predictions but to structure initial conversations about what is to be done and what needs to be done to get there; and then to learn from the estimates to do better the next time.

Begbie’s estimation rules are to keep tasks estimated duration between a half and two days - larger tasks should be broken down, smaller tasks should be aggregated.