Would you estimate, if your client din’t ask you to?

When we talk of software delivery, we talk of “Agile”. While we don’t plan our projects too far along into the future, mostly likely we need to estimate our plans to give the client an idea about cost, time, releases, etc. It’s become a mundane process for most of us to estimate our stories. More often than not, we(as devs) crib about this and would much rather spend our time to code.

We’re working for a client for a long period of time now, and the client is happy with the team’s performance. They(client) know the team puts in their best efforts and delivers quality features continuously. The client might have started to feel estimating is probably a waste of time. Do you agree? While I am no expert, read on to know my point of view.

• Estimates, to me help measure progress. How else do you know you did well! Sure, there can be other measures; but estimates is one that I know of.
• More than the final estimate we arrive at, I believe estimates motivate the team to have that extra bit of conversation. Arguing over why it’s a “Large” and not a “Medium” story, makes us unintentionally think of what we would have to do, to get this story done. I think, this is the time when we start to foresee dependencies and blockers much more clearly.
• What’s a good indicator that the story we have sliced is too big and is going to delay the feedback cycle for us? The estimate!
• A great deal of insight is found when we get them wrong. Why a story took longer than anticipated, and why this happens for most stories, helps us identify patterns. Realising that our QA is overloaded and the devs need to support them, is one such example.
• And the obvious value estimates give us - planning. Knowing how much in advance we might need to play those stories to put out that feature by May end, helps us enjoy our Summer.

I also spoke to a few folks and they had these things to say:

“Discipline in its own sake is important.”-Akshay Dhavle

“There should be some mechanism in the team to reflect on whether they are improving. For example you could track and improve the frequency of going to production. Once in weeks to multiple times in a day.”-Chirag Doshi

“Having multiple eyes and brains is useful, but may also cause a havoc and could lead to problems.” -Digvijay Gunjal

I hope the next time you walk into a meeting to estimate, you have an enthusiasm for it :)

So yes, I would yet like to estimate. Now, popping the question to you- What would you rather do, Estimate or Not?