Agile Estimate Like Your Life Depends On It

By James K Smith, linkedin.com/in/jamesksmith, [email protected]

In this article, James illustrates why Agile Estimating is another human survival mechanism that has no dependency on time estimation. Excerpted from his Agile 101 class.

Imagine a raging rhinocerous is chasing you through the forest. You come upon a tree and a boulder, side by side. The tree has branches, the boulder is climbable because it has hand/foot-holds. The rhinocerous is coming up fast. You've got to get out of reach of the rhinocerous to maximize your chances of survival. Quick, what do you do?

Let me think about how I would respond to this threat to my survival. I don't have time to do some analysis on how long it would take to climb the tree versus crawling on top of the boulder that would yield any kind of accuracy I could bet my life on. What I'd probably do is take a snapshot of what seems to be the least complex thing to do, then act on that decision.

This is a line of thinking that is a survival mechanism in human agility. The ability to compare complexity quickly is one reason why we are the apex species on this planet. And it's why we don't instinctively equate relative complexity estimations to units of time. That's just plain dangerous.

Here's a maxim I adhere to: Estimating for fixed time required to reach a Minimum Survivable Solution in a changing system is a recipe for death.

So let's say I made the right choice, and survived the encounter with the rhinocerous. Oh yeah, now we have something to work with that further illustrates the brilliance of generations of human agility become instinctive. Note these agile patterns in what happened in this survival scenario:

1) Just enough, just in time. Never over-commit.

2) Inspect and adapt, given the experience.

3) Next time around, maximize the amount of work NOT done.

Thanks to surviving that experience, I have a kind of yardstick now. If I ever get stuck in that experience again, I can even more quickly analyze the situation and make a choice that much faster, with greater commitment and less work. Not only that, I now have a survival experience that I can use in my analysis of future challenges. The result is, greater confidence to commit to future minimum viable solutions.

So scrum masters, coach your teams to not attempt to equate relative size estimating, whether using t-shirt sizes or Fibonacci numbers or whatever, to units of time. Trust the Scrum process and be patient. Estimations, along with your team's confidence to commit to those estimations, will get better over time. All you're looking for in the spirit of “just enough, just in time,” is to survive to the next day, understanding that you'll know more tomorrow than you did today.

Individually we are wired to be agile. You want a high-performing team? Raise this realization to the team level and turn it into team instinct.

Until next time,

James

James Smith has a 25 year career building high-performing technology teams and organizations for a multitude of industries. He enjoys working with startups to some of the largest corporations in the world, has held several highland games world records, and has pitched to VC using nothing more than napkin drawings and a bowl of M and M's. He claims there's only one truely always-optimizable XOR result in the universe, that either 2+2=4 or it doesn't, but not both. Otherwise, some of the best answers can be found in the grey areas.

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