Commitments without regrets

I have yet to meet a person who loves estimating. And I can’t say I’m surprised, estimating is an act of predicting the future while our evolved ape brain fights us the whole way. So it’s hard. And as a cherry on top, we’re typically held responsible for those predictions.

However, I wager that the core reason for that lack of love is not because of estimating itself but rather because of what it is used for – producing commitment, as it’s those commitments that will often come back to haunt us during the project’s lifetime.

Unfortunately, the fact of life is that estimates are necessary. Without estimates, there can be no commitments (at least not meaningful ones) and without meaningful commitments, there can be no meaningful budgets and consequently – no products that we want to build.

This talk is about the theory and practice of estimating effort within the context of software development, with a particular focus on how to do it properly, and how to then meaningfully commit based upon it.

We will be talking about subjects such as prerequisites for estimations, how to read estimates, how business analysts or functional designers “fit into it all” and finally how to traverse that “last mile” between estimate and resulting commitment in a way that we won’t regret it the morning after.

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