"SPA 2007 session on estimating" by petrovg

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 04:35:00 PDT

This is the first one from the SPA conference that I write about. Don’t know why, just seemed to impressed me and I made a few notes during it, so here they come. These are actually my observations, not all of them were discussed in the session, but it prompted them.

When estimating stories, it is quite important that the right precision is used. Eg. if the minimum estimating period is one day, and many stories only take a fraction of the day, when you sum the thing up, you’ll be easily tripling the actual estimate.

People always find a way to over-complicate things and assume there’s more that needs to be done. I reckon that’s a psychological need to overcompensate, because as kids people (parents, teachers) were never satisfied with us, so we always assume there something more that is required from us.

When stories are presented as a group, people assume associations between them. Like, “oh but I already did story X, which gives me A, so don’t need to do it here”. Not sure if this is good or bad, but what if story X gets deprioritised - we’ll have to revise estimate, well, there’s some interference between them, can’t quite figure out what…

You can’t really estimate a story without actually picturing the system, yet many people try. A guy gave a great analogy - a skier or boarder plans his route. Has some idea what and where he’s going to be in x, y, z minutes. There’s a big difference if you know what you’re actually going to do.

Anyway, it was a really good session, and the guys did a few experiments with us without us knowing and then gave us the results to demonstrate the anchoring effect of the presence of numbers in specs and the size of the spec’s dependence on the estimates.

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"SPA 2007 session on estimating" by petrovg