#NoEstimates is not about refusing to estimate

It’s (a hashtag) for those willing to explore alternatives to estimates in software development, exploring various approaches to delivering software without the use of estimates. The commonality between those #NoEstimates approaches seems to be the continuous delivery of small increments of high quality, valuable software. Here are some of them and some thoughts about the rising #NoEstimates debate…

Scalable Agile Estimation (SAFe) - By VersionOne

As agile projects need to scale up from a single team agile project to a multi-team (team of teams) agile program to an agile portfolio of coordinated agile programs to an entire agile enterprise managing a set of coordinated agile portfolios, agile estimation becomes much more challenging.  We need appropriate estimation methods that can scale up to handle large agile projects consisting of several tens of agile teams involving several hundreds of team members.   story points need to be normalized so they represent the same amount of work across the space and time dimensions. (VersionOne)

Wild-Ass Guess (WAG) Estimate+S

Do you need to estimate where there is no sufficient data available? So do it the WAG way. A WAG is an off-the-cuff estimate for something when there is insufficient data available to support a more informed estimation. In Agile and scrum software development, a WAG is often based upon historical experience. Add some ‘S’ to your WAG and make it a more a scientific answer.

Agile Estimation using Silent Grouping and Sizing

“Silent Grouping is a facilitation technique for getting people to group related items without talking. Jean Tabaka has a summary of the technique in her book ‘Collaboration Explained’ as part of a set of techniques used to help teams process large amounts of information. Silent Grouping has several advantages. It is fast, which in turn leads to significant time and cost savings.”