Summary

Martin Fowler has written an excellent piece on estimation. Go read it. Inspired by his post, I have a tiny extra point to make: we still need to adopt Agile (whatever that means), even in 2013.

We're in the post-Agile era

It's 2013 and Agile hasn't solved every team's problems like we were promised. We blame Scrum, we blame ourselves for not having enough faith, and sometimes we blame individual Agile practices. Today the Agile practice under fire is estimation.

The short version of the complaint is that estimation is wasteful and you shouldn't need to spend valuable time doing it. Martin Fowler wrote an excellent piece that doesn't deny the cost of estimation, and gives some good tips for identifying when estimation is valuable. Go read the article.

Incidentally if it sounds like I disagree with his article in any way, just for the record, I'm on team Martin on this one. I don't pretend to have the authority to disagree anyway.

The danger of post-agile

The backlash against Agile is useful in that each time an Agile practice is assaulted, it is then defended. In turn the defense (like Martin's article) helps onlookers like me understand why the practice exists. That's a good thing.

The problem with all these assaults against Agile practices is that the old arguments for adoption don't fly as well as they used to. "Because Agile says so" is no longer a good enough reason to adopt it. And while examining each practice for waste is great for already high-performing teams, almost every team I've met or heard about could benefit by adopting ALL of Agile. ALL of it, including the wasteful parts--Agile is a net win for most everyone. Even in 2013. Even Scrum.

War stories

  • I've met a team that does exclusive checkouts. That was 2012. In case you've never seen this, it means that when one developer checks out a file, no one else can open it for editing and must wait for him to finish before even beginning their own edits.
  • The majority of projects don't use Continuous Integration, even to compile their project.
  • I've met a team that did estimation (in hours). When asked what they do when they are over their estimate, they said they close the original task and "borrow" hours from other features assigned to the developer. I hid my horror well when I heard that.
  • I have met developers that routinely check in broken code.
  • I have met guys a few years from retirement that contributed nothing to a project.
  • I saw a job posting from last year that said roughly "We have great developers, but they're not great with SVN. Your job duties include taking zip files via email and checking them in."

The point of these little bullets is to say that there is a lot of dysfunction in the world, and adopting Agile will at the least reveal that dysfunction.

Agile: bring the pain

So I entreat you, if you are starting out fresh somewhere and are wondering about this whole Agile stuff, look. You can skip Agile and write your functional-paradigm Lean project, no sprints, no formal retrospective meetings, no stand-ups, doing code reviews instead of pairing, doing BDD with no unit tests at all, all tests written after the production code, and all this done without estimation. Go do that, it's all good, you get it.

But if you're in a situation where you're not sure "what is it, you say, you do here," go ahead and buy the books and adopt strict XP/Scrum-flavored Agile and start fixing problems. And when someone brings up an argument saying "estimation is wasteful", maybe they're right, but it's more likely that they have never seen estimation done properly, and you just need to do inefficient Scrum by rote until you understand why. And if it truly isn't working, don't give it up just yet--try and understand many of the common team anti-patterns now disguised by post-Agile. A real problem I've seen with post-Agile is that people no longer try to make Agile work, and they justify all kinds of poor behavior under post-Agilism.

The World Of Duh: A blog series

Welcome to the World of Duh, a blog series in which I talk about something new to me in an informal, unresearched, and often factually inaccurate way. My goal with this series of posts is to help those similar to me. Given I didn't do much research on the topic, take it for what it's worth: just some guy's opinion. You're welcome.