Estimations - Best, Expected and Worst

One of these posts I'll stop mentioning Dave Thomas, but until then...

Another thing that he mentioned was how to give estimates. Nobody should give a single point estimate. No risk factor is involved. But given a best case, expected case and worst case, it is quite easy to see what is risky and what isn't. With this in mind, we spent quite a few hours today giving high level estimates for our current work using these three points. (Work that we hadn't estimated but had planned to sometime this week. Isn't it nice how things come together sometimes...) I think everyone got something good out of it and our estimates feel a bit more accurate and considered.

To be honest, as a developer, I feel horrible when I miss an estimate, whether it is longer or shorter than expected. But with three point estimates, as long as we hit the range and are good about being close to our expected I don't think I'll mind missing our expected estimate (which is the only one we gave in the past).

Feeling the Rhythm

When we've been writing tests lately I've caught us occasionally not feeling the rhythm. It's more obvious now and I'm actually stopping and looking for a red bar. And I haven't found it on a at least 2-3 times over the last few days.

A test without the Red Bar is a waste of everyone's time and instills false confidence/trust that will get shattered eventually.

Dave Thomas sound bites

Dave Thomas (the SmallTalk one and not the Ruby one) gave a very interesting presentation tonight with a lot of good information in it. Two things really stood out for me:

1. Best Wrong Way
   
2. Stories without Acceptance Tests are wishes (I may be paraphrasing slightly)

Best Wrong Way means that today we are doing our Best Wrong Way and tomorrow we will find a better Wrong Way. There is no Best Right Way (just like there are no Silver Bullets). A lot like focusing on making things no worse instead of trying to always make things better.

I think wishes speaks for itself.

Almost an Agile conference in Brisbane

I mentioned Agile conferences in Brisbane before (specifically the lack of), but now it looks like there will be something with possibly an Agile track at the end of May, 2008. Thanks to Dave Thomas (not the pragmatic one, the other one :) ), we'll be seeing a major conference with a definite technical focus in Brisbane. Yay! Details of speakers and tracks should be updated some time in January.