Estimates provide project leadership with a view of the project reality to make good decisions, but there is rarely certainty in software development. While estimates solve problems for businesses that want cost and schedule certainty, the problems can potentially be solved differently. The #NoEstimates approach eliminates much of the planning work in favor of collaborating with customers to develop high-level goals and deliver working software frequently, forming a partnership rather than a contractual negotiation. It moves away from committing to requirements that will not be worked on immediately and allows requirements to evolve over time.

1. Estimates

2. Estimates#No

3. a good estimate is one that
provides clear enough view on the
project reality to allow the project
leadership to make good
decisions about how to control the
project to hit it’s targets.

4. Making an Estimation
while estimates solve a problem, what
problem do they solve, exactly?
TIME COST DATE
• “the business as a whole is trying to make a
decision — about how to spend it’s money (your
time)” Dan Milstein
• Businesses need certainty about what they will
get and when
• Unfortunately for most businesses there is very
rarely any certainty in software design and
development

5. • You can break the work down into
chunks and add it up
• you can look at a variety of similar
projects to compare
• you can stick your finger in the air
and guess
HOWTO
ESTIMATE

6. Vacations Holidays Sick days Training Weekends
Company meetings Department meetings
Setting up new workstations Installing new
v e r s i o n s o f t o o l s o n w o r k s t a t i o n s
Troubleshooting hardware and software
problems Ramp-up time for new team members
Mentoring of new team members Management
coordination/manager meetings Cutover/
deployment Data conversion Installation
Customization Requirements clarifications
Maintaining the revision control system
Supporting the build Maintaining the scripts
required to run the daily build Maintaining the
automated smoke test used in conjunction with
the daily build Installation of test builds at user
location(s) Creation of test data [Steve McConnell]
MISS ME?

7. UNKNOWNS
UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS
how do you calculate them?
5% 10% 25%

8. Problems
with
wtf-agile
visualized
Waterfall WTF
AgileWTF
Estimates
save your time?
Cost
&
Dates
Cost
&
Dates
Cost
&
Dates
Cost
&
Dates
Cost
&
Dates

9. What The Hell
We’ll define #NoEstimates as
running a software project
without any human estimation
process. If customers asks,
"How long will it take?" that's
estimating. If they ask what’s
next, that's #NoEstimates.

10. "My boss would never go for that" may
sound like an invitation for dialogue,
but it's actually a fiat.
A term used in policy
debate, the
affirmative's power to
pass the plan in order
to debate impacts.
Allows the debate to
progress instead of
debating whether or
not the plan will be
passed.
• Clearly, many software
customers want estimates. In
many cases, those are
reasonable.
• next logical question: What
problems do estimates solve,
and can we solve them a
different way?

11. ” #NoEstimates is not about
ditching estimates. It is about
improving the way we work such
that estimates become redundant.“
Neil Killick

12. When you tell the customer this
task will take 1-2 day
the customer hear 1 day
you hear 2 days
!
always the way

13. Some Sciences
Duncker’s candle problem

14. Some Sciences
Duncker’s candle problem
the wall

15. Some Sciences
Duncker’s candle problem
Overcome functional fixedness:
remove pins out of the box

16. Some Sciences
Duncker’s candle problem
20th 21thcentury

17. Some Sciences
Overestimation
Parkinson’s law:
work expands to fill
the time available for
its completion

18. Some Sciences
Effectcost
schedule
overestimation ➡underestimation
100%<100% >100%
Linear penalty due
to Parkinson’s law
Nonlinear penalty
due to planning
errors, upstream
defects, high-risk
practices
target as % of Nominal Estimation

19. the Cone of Uncertainty

20. A project is behind schedule and
over its budget the day it is started.
Don Norman

21. what to do

22. #NoEstimates
J.B. Rainsberger, the author of “jUnit Recipes”,
points out that his first solo software project was
just like this. Rainsberger made no promises up
front, offering instead to show working software
every two weeks — and also allowing the client to
fire him with as little as two weeks' notice.
1. Make Starting Amount of Money
Small; Deliver Working Software Often

23. John Carmack, CEO of Id Software, is famous for the
expression "it's done when it's done," so much so
that the phrase appears under Carmack's name
on WikiQuote.
!
It's worth noting that Apple, one of the largest
publicly traded organizations in the world, is
secretive about upcoming products and refuses to
make quarterly earnings estimates for shareholders
or Wall Street. It doesn't seem to be hurting them.
2. Drop Estimation From Your
Development Process Entirely
#NoEstimates

24. • Most planning work is eliminated here in favor of
developing high-level goals in collaboration with
the customer. !
• At the same time, that's essentially the business
model of Menlo Innovations.!
• By the end of a budget period, the customer could
steer to a place very different that the original
goal. The customer gets what it needs in the
moment — not what it thought it needed six
months ago.
3. Move From Contract Negotiation to
Partnership
#NoEstimates

25. !
•Troy Magennis, a former executive at Sabre
Holdings and Travelocity, has done some of the
most prominent work in this space. Magennis has
also developed predictive models that include
complex elements like deviation, cycle time,
defects/time for repair and so on…!
•Even without a complex model, most agile teams
are capable of producing a burn-down chart that
can answer the question, "Is this date and this
scope possible?"
22. Fund a Pilot That Delivers Working
Software; Then Use Modeling to
Forecast Schedule
#NoEstimates
• sounds crazy though

27. #NoEstimates Really About
Solving Problems a
Different Way

28. With the #NoEstimates approach we don't commit to
requirements that we are not going to immediately
work on
The reason is simple: requirements have a "best
before" date and expire.

29. Oleg.Shanyuk@gmail.com
@gelosi
Follow: #NoEstimates,
@mattt, @soffes, @edog1203, @johnmaeda, …