Skip to main content

Agile Estimating and Planning

Image
By
by Mike Cohn
ISBN: 978-0131479418

I bought this book because I'm generally rubbish at estimating (I usually under estimate). Also, although we have the technical elements of agile (source control, unit tests, continuous integration, etc) sorted, my agile project management is not all it could be. Agile Estimating and Planning may be as close as I ever get to a silver bullet.

To be honest I expected to be let down and that the scenarios described in the book would not match the situations I find myself in. I was not let down at all. The book covers both planning when features are important and planning when a deadline is important.

It taught me that it was wrong to break stories into tasks when release planning and to leave that for iteration planning. The book discusses the use of both story points and ideal days in estimating, what they both are, the differences between them and then suggests you should use story points.

It described what release and iteration planning are and when to use them. It also discusses how to predict, where necessary, and how to measure velocity in order to calculate the duration of projects. One of the most important things covered from my point of view was how, when and with what to report to the product owner and stake holders.

The book finishes with a 60 page case study. I was tempted not to bother reading this as it goes over the main points covered in the rest of the book again. I was glad I read it and if you buy this book you should read the case study if you read nothing else. It helps put in context how estimating should be done and describes the processes surrounding it.

All I have to do now is write a distilled version for my team, including the project managers, product owners and stakeholder and put it into practice.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's great to be back at the ACCU Conference 2025!

By
Last week I was back at the ACCU Conference in Bristol, for the first time since I gave an opening keynote in 2019 . In March 2020, COVID hit the UK and I got out of the habit of attending and speaking at conferences. Plus the ACCU Conference, and the organisation in general, took a big step back towards C++ and that hasn’t been relevant to me for nearly two decades. It’s taken until now, 2025 for me to want to talk again, and I was really pleased to be accepted for the ACCU Conference again. It was just a 20 minute session and I only attended for the day I was speaking. There was enough varied content for it to be interesting to me and I’m hoping to be back for the full conference next year. I really enjoyed attending and it was great to catch up with people I hadn’t seen for years. I felt re-engaged and particularly liked being asked if I’d been to nor(DEV):con . Learning to stop writing code (and why you won't miss it) Daisy Hollman I should have read the summary of the openin...
1 comment
Read more

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

By
I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...
Post a Comment
Read more

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

By
I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th...
22 comments
Read more