I know it’s a bit harsh to insult you in the title of this post, but the odds are, you really stink at estimation. Even if you know you’re bad at it, you’re probably even worse than you think.

Don’t take it so personally – I’m certainly not saying I’m perfect at it either! But you’re among friends here, so let’s have an honest discussion.

While you will never be perfect at estimation (it is after little more than prediction of the future), you can get better at building and communicating estimates if you remember a few key reasons why you’re so bad at it. You’re still human after all, and so I guarantee you will fall into some of these traps.

Reason #1: You’re doing it alone

Too often, estimates are done alone. Typical scenarios include one person (such as the team lead) estimating an entire project, or a project manager going to a specific developer and asking them for an estimate. One person giving an estimate by themselves is one of the most unreliable ways to give an estimate, because there is no one to check you against common biases. And since all initial estimates tend to be very optimistic, you are almost guaranteed to set unrealistic expectations.

Reason #2: You’re doing it for others

When the team lead gives an estimate on behalf of their team, several problems ensue. First, you are relying solely on the judgment of one person (the team lead), and no matter how smart that person thinks they are, they are susceptible to biases when they go it alone. Second, when the rest of the team is told what the estimate for the project is, they had no voice in it, and therefore, they have no sense of ownership in that estimate. A lack of ownership means they will have no sense of accountability, and they will not go the extra mile to stick to the estimate.

Reason #3: You’re being way too optimistic

Very few of us give pessimistic estimates. For one reason, we want to please the customer. When they say they want something in two weeks, we make mental leaps in how we will build the software to try and get them what they want. Or we discount the likelihood of obstacles, and hope for the best case scenario.

Reason #4: You think you’re an expert

There’s a great chapter in the book “The Black Swan” about the problems with predictions, and one problem described is “the expert problem.” Studies have shown that experts tend to underestimate their own margins of error on predictions, because they are overconfident in their expert status. As software developers, we fall into this trap regularly when we say things like “oh yeah, that will be easy, I’ve done something similar before.” When we do remember that task last time was not as easy as we thought it would be, we often discount those obstacles we encountered as outliers. We assume that “now that we know how to do it”, we won’t encounter those obstacles again, and no other obstacles will arise. We are usually wrong.

Reason #5: You’re using single point estimates

Using single point estimates makes all of these previous reasons worse. Single point estimates encourage you to go with your gut and the first number you think of, or the number that the customer wants to hear. Think how ridiculous it would be someone asked you “How long does it take to get to your house?”, and you answered “Oh, about 25.6735 minutes”. By including all those extra decimal points, you are creating a false impression of accuracy. Single point estimates are the same idea. If I say “it takes 25 minutes to get home”, then you will expect to be there in exactly 25 minutes. But what about traffic, or other variables? A more accurate answer is to say that it takes “25-30 minutes, depending on traffic.”

A solution to estimation biases: Range estimation in Scrum Poker

Using a range instead offers a lot of benefits. By saying “that will take me 2-5 days” instead of “I can get that to you in two days”, you are communicating the uncertainty that is inherent in all software development. The size of the range you provide communicates risk. And it prepares the customer for a more realistic schedule, instead of setting you up for failure when they expect completion on the most optimistic schedule possible.

Combining range estimation with the Agile practices of team estimation is doubly effective. In Agile teams we often play “Scrum Poker.” I’ll avoid the long description of it here, but in short, each team member gets a deck of cards. When you are estimating a story or a task, each team member privately chooses a card (or range of cards) from their deck. When everyone has chosen, they all show their cards at the same time.

Showing the cards at the same time combats a number of the reasons I list above, because you get a true sense of the variety of estimates across the team without introducing the biases of the team lead or architect. Those who picked the lowest or highest estimates are not discounted as outliers, but encouraged to describe to the team why they chose that number. This encourages the team to discuss the idea until they have reached a common vision for the complexity of that story or task.

Agile team estimation is great, but one big problem I still have with it is the reliance on single point estimates. That’s why we use range estimation in our Scrum Poker at OpenSource Connections, and we find it to be more effective. By holding two cards instead of one, each team member is indicating a range estimate and communicating lot more about the risk and complexity that they see in that project.

Next Tuesday (August 10th, from 11am-noon in room Asia5) I’ll be presenting at the Agile 2010 conference on “Building a More Accurate Burndown: Using Range Estimation in Scrum”. If you’re going to be in Orlando, I hope you’ll stop by to hear more! You can also see my slides on slideshare.

Arin Sime is a Senior Consultant with OpenSource Connections, specializing in Agile process consulting, Solr search, and development consulting. You can follow Arin’s tweets at ArinSime

beCamp 2010 is almost here! April 30th and May 1st are just four weeks away!

If you’re a geek in or around the Charlottesville metroplex or even if you’re merely tech-curious, this is the event you don’t want to miss. beCamp is Charlottesville’s version of the BarCamp unconference phenomenon—organized on the fly by attendees, for attendees. Realizing that the most energizing parts of any tech conference are the ad hoc conversations that take place in the hallways between the sessions, beCamp facilitates these types of interactions for an entire event.

As of this writing, we are at 87 campers! To participate, just add your name to the wiki page!

A big thank you to all our sponsors, including at this point,  Hotelicopter, Google, Perrin Quarles and Associates, NRAO, and University of Virginia ITC.  Interested in supporting the Cville tech community?  Check out our needs at http://barcamp.org/sponsor-beCamp-2010.

Three OSCiers attended DevDays DC and for a one day show there were some interesting moments and quite a bit of information to be absorbed.

The conference started with a funny clip by the people at Fog Creek and had a nice lineup of speakers.

You can find my notes from most of the presentations here.

So, is James Bach (@jamesmarcusbach) the bad boy of testing?

I flew up to Boston on Monday to lead some workshops on Continuous Integration. I checked into my room at the Hyatt and then went downstairs to see who was around. I ran into a couple of speakers milling about, and eventually joined one of them, and we headed over to the MIT Press bookstore, me to look for my Solr book. I wasn’t too sure of the name of the other speaker I was with (I asked once, but couldn’t quite remember what it was…). So we got to the book shop, I ask my fellow speaker again: James Bach. The name I was familiar with, but couldn’t quite place it… I ended up buying Parentonomics, and then we go for coffee.

So, over coffee, he asks me about what my topic is, and I gave him the brief summary of my two CI related workshops. Wow.. Little did I realize that I was sitting with the guy who rails against the “fetish” that Agile folks have for automated testing! That his entire approach to “testing” is to use skilled, motivated folks who do “sapient testing”. And I’m the guy who’s selling an approach that REQUIRES automated tests! That encourages expanding the use of automated testing!

He actually walked me through a process of talking about how to “think like a tester”, and it was really great mini-workshop.. He definitely subscribes to the socratic approach, and believes in his message, I was sweating at the end of it! That chat probably sparked more ideas in less time over that coffee then anything else this week. I also heard a lot of ideas and phrases that were echoed in Michael Bolton’s keynote later on in the week. Clearly a lot of collaboration between the two!

Probably the biggest idea that James and chatted about was the idea that automated tests really aren’t automated tests, they are automated checks. They verify that the expected behavior of the code was met. His argument that if you want to do testing, real testing, then computers, automated processes can’t meet that need, only people can.

Now, I don’t know if I believe that is completely true, but I am very aware that the “manual testing” where long test scripts written as Word documents are executed by human beings by hand are really a waste of human potential. And that those test scripts are really, to use James terms, “check scripts” because the people are not using any creativity! In fact, a lot of my interest in CI comes from the idea that people should not do monkey testing, that machines can do it much better, and my frustation with the perception that testing is a low value activity and can be easily shipped off to low skilled folks.

I think that this shift away from the term “test” for automated tests is actually happening in many places. In the Ruby world, we have libraries like Shoulda that are moving from using words like assert to other words like should. A Cucumber test really shows how controlled the space that a test needs to be to work well in an automated fashion:

Scenario: See all vendors
Given I am logged in as a user in the administrator role
And There are 3 vendors
When I go to the manage vendors page
Then I should see the first 3 vendor names

So while I don’t know if I am bought in on the idea that only people can do “testing”, and machines can only do “checking”. Tools like Heckle try to simulate aspects of what a human can do. While not suggesting that we can automate the “does my website look okay after someone changed the CSS” type of work today, in the future our automated testing will be more capable then just “checking” because we will move beyond the very constrained tests we have today to ones that mimicing the richness of the simulators that Airline Pilots use. Instead of testing the training given to pilots, we’ll be testing the robustness of software via simulations!

At any rate, James Bach, while taking a rather provocative approach to sharing his ideas, does subscribe to my favorite bullet in the Agile Manifesto: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

Here is him giving a great presentation with the subversive title of “How to Fake a Project” that was incredible entertaining, and also quite thought provoking:

What do you think? Automated testing is a fetish of the Agile community?

Why do we need to sell Agile?

For those of us who know and love Agile, the benefits of Agile seem obvious.  It can be frustrating when someone doesn’t inherently see those benefits, and we sometimes forget that we need to sell our clients or our managers on our process.

For some perspective on the gut reaction many people have to Agile, consider the following quote.  John Zachman penned a famous paper on software architecture design in the 1980′s, where he said:

“Some kind of structure (or architecture) is imperative because decentralization without structure is chaos.” – J.A. Zachman, 1987, “A framework for information systems architecture”

As practitioners of Agile, we need to remember that someone’s first reaction may be that we are engaging in chaos, and so we need to consider beforehands the needs of our client or manager and how we can convince them to follow a better process.

In this post, I will briefly present 12 techniques for selling a traditional client on an Agile project plan.  This post is based on a talk I gave at Agile 2009 and to a number of other user groups, and which you can see on Slideshare here.

As part of preparing this presentation, I created a survey of fellow grad students in UVa’s MSMIT program and other colleagues in the field.  I asked them how they have sold Agile or been sold on Agile.  Not everyone who answered the survey was a fan of agile and many of their quotes are interesting.

You can see the survey yourself here, and add your own feedback to it:
http://www.tinyurl.com/SellingAgileSurvey/

Those who answered the survey are all experienced IT veterans who have worked for a wide range of organizations, including Booz Allen Hamilton, SAIC, Capitol One, the International Monetary Fund, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and more.

First, a couple of general comments from the survey that I found interesting:

“Agile seems to carry the connotation of ‘codelike-hell’ or just, ‘work faster’.”

“I am skeptical of any methods that that could be interpreted as ‘cutting corners’”

These are common first impressions of Agile, and I hope the following 12 techniques will give you ideas how to convince your clients or managers that Agile is the way to go and their first impressions are not accurate.  These techniques are based on a survey of current literature, my own consulting experiences at OpenSource Connections, and the feedback I received from the survey mentioned above.

1. Trial by Sprint

“You need to show a success to get adoption.”

Consider giving your boss an option.  Ask them to give you a sprint or two to try Agile out, and if they don’t like it, then you will go back to the old ways of doing things.  Make sure that you pick tasks for those trial sprints which can be successfully accomplished, and will show your boss the value of the incremental delivery of Agile.  You should also encourage your boss to play a role in the daily standups and see how communication in your team improves.

2.  Case Studies in Success

Do some research on similar companies to yours, and what methodologies they are using.  By googling around online, you should be able to find some case studies on Agile success and present those to your boss.

3.  Client Testimonials

For consultants, make sure you go back to your clients after a project and interview them.  Ask them how your process worked, and gather some quotes you can use in future proposals or client discussions.  I did this for one of our recent projects, and the customer gave us some great feedback like:

“Certainly one of the most successful projects ever here … Scrum eliminated my biases of what developers could do by letting them self-select.”

4. Find a Champion

One approach is to let others do the selling for you.  This is particularly useful for consultants who already have a relationship with a client, and you can let some of the clients’ employees talk about how they want you to use Scrum.  Or, as one of my classmates did, he became the internal champion for Agile:

“I highlighted the benefits to the Project Manager: higher productivity and less team management stuff since the team will take care of lots of team-management and updating (burn charts) instead of PM’s managing those details.”

Basically, identify a stakeholder in the project who is most in need of the benefits of Agile, and enlist their support to help you sell management on the use of Agile.

5. Use Metrics of Success

Many traditional clients like their current methods because they provide metrics that they can graph and look at.  They don’t always immediately understand how they can measure a project using methodology without a lot of documents.

But Agile has its own metrics too, and perhaps you can use those to sway the client.  Consider presenting them with information on velocity, story points completed vs waiting, test coverage, unit test success, etc.  Some Agile tools will provide these in pretty reports, but you can also fashion them yourself.  And don’t forget to show them the benefits of the burndown chart if you’re using Scrum, and emphasize how this gives them a real time view into the health of a sprint without encumbering the developers with lots of reporting.

6. Show how Agile combats common IT failures

One of my professors, Ryan Nelson, has been running a study of project retrospectives over the last 10 years, and has published articles in MIS Quarterly Executive detailing the Top Classic Mistakes in IT projects.  The top 3 are consistently:  Poor estimation and scheduling, Ineffective Stakeholder Management, and Insufficient Risk Management.  Agile can be used to address all those classic mistakes.

Consider why projects normally fail in your organization, and present the ways that Agile combats those common failures.

7. Examples of government/industry leaders using Agile

As one of my classmates pointed out:

“Clients, especially the military, are wary of catch phrases and sometimes unwilling to change their habits.”

If your client or boss fits that description, then you need to convince them they are not the first to try Agile, and that it has been used elsewhere successfully.  Try to find examples of their peers in industry or government using Agile, and point to them as an example.

One example you can use is my previous blog post about the CIA using Agile and Scrum.

8. Comparison to other methodologies

Compare how Agile/Scrum work compared to areas that your client or boss is already familiar with.  Try to point out both the similarities and the differences.  For example, one of my classmates took the following approach:

“I gave an overview of the Scrum process and highlighted the ease of transition since iterative/incremental development has been in practice for a long time (in other forms such as a spiral approach)”

9.  Listen to their needs and address them.

“I am always skeptical of anything that promises it is the ‘only’ or the ‘best’ [methodology].” – Comment from a development manager

Instead of going into the meeting and kicking off the discussion with your rant on why Agile is the best development methodology, take time to listen to your client or manager first.

Ask them how their projects have been going, what challenges they face, and take notes on their common problems.  Then suggest how Agile will address some of these issues.

The key here is to spend most of your time listening, and only then talk up the benefits of Agile.  This will assure your audience that you have heard their concerns, and that you are trying to present positive solutions to their problems.  This can be much more effective than trying to force a methodology on them.

10.  Sneak it in

This is a very common approach, and one that I have done before too.  One of my classmates is a technology program manager, and they commented that:

“I make sure I utilize agile practices where ever I can – I just don’t use the agile terminology.”

The point here is not to be deceptive, it’s just that sometimes you don’t need the sign off from the boss to do something.  After you successfully conclude your project, you can then point out to your boss that “by the way, all that stuff we did that really impressed you – that was Agile.”  Now that they have a positive impression and have witnessed some success, you can work on letting them formally adopt the process.

Note that doing this might require you to temporarily also fill out the same reports or status updates your current process requires, but hopefully you can get those dropped after having showed the benefits of Agile.

11.  Compromise

An agile purist may not like the idea of compromising, but I found the following sentiment to be pretty common:

“The methodology that has worked in my experience has been to incrementally introduce Agile … Start using a limited set of the practices and gradually start bringing in more.”

Similar to the “Sneak it in” approach, this can be done with or without your boss’s knowledge.

12.  Agile Project Management Office

One other thought to consider is setting up an Agile Project Management Office, or PMO.  A traditional PMO is a very document and regulation intense group, but some Agile practitioners have started to promote the idea of a lighter weight PMO.  An Agile PMO focuses less on micro managing teams, and more on providing an interface to traditional processes.  The Agile PMO can help Agile development teams by taking ownership of any burdensome compliance requirements which go against Agile processes.  This allows the developers to concentrate on developing code how they want, and not filling out checklists of documents.

They can also serve as an educator and coach to the client.

Conclusion

There are many variants on the above ideas, but I hope this quick list has given you some direction on different strategies you can use for convincing people to adopt Agile.  Keep in mind that each of these strategies has pros and cons, and you should consider the needs of your situation before adopting any particular strategy.

If you have other suggestions, please leave a comment and I look forward to hearing your feedback!

Arin Sime’s presentation last week at Agile 2009 on how to sell a traditional client on an agile plan made a good impression, apparently.  First, his presentation was featured on the front page of SlideShare.

Now, he’s received an excellent writeup from Adam Goucher (we were pointed to Adam’s writeup from here).  Many thanks to Adam for the kind words about Arin’s writeup!

Arin’s next speaking engagement is at the University of Virginia’s EdUI conference on September 22, covering the Facebook API.  He’d love to see you there!

OSC is proud to announce that we will attend and sponsor this year’s EdUI Conference 2009 which is bein held at the University of Virginia on 21st-22nd September 2009. A number of folks from the OSC team will be attending, and stop by our booth in the Vendor Hall on the second day and introduce yourself!

EdUI 2009 boasts a powerhouse lineup of renowned and popular headliner speakers, most often found at the Web industry’s premier events. In addition to these, it features a series of presentations, selected through a proposal process, to allow peers, colleagues, and geek kindreds to enlighten one another with their expertise and ideas. Our very own Arin Sime will be speaking on The Facebook API: Thinking About UI in a Social Way.

I’m very pleased to be co-speaking with Wayne Graham at EdUI 2009 at the University of Virginia this September 22nd.  EdUI 2009 posted the full conference schedule today, which included the talk Wayne and I will give.  Here’s the description for our talk:

The Facebook API:  Thinking about UI in a social way

Building an application for the Facebook API is very different than your standard application. The basic concepts and flow of your application need to conform to underlying principles of social media in order for people to use your application and share it with their friends. We will discuss the development and implementation of Facebook applications based on our own experiences and drawing on the best practices of other projects. Wayne will discuss his implementation of the Facebook-Athenaeum project, and Arin will discuss his experiences building an application for fundraising on Facebook. The presentation will be a mixture of high level design concepts, details on the Facebook API, and code examples. 

We’ll be speaking on Day 2, September 22, from 2:15 – 3:00 pm.  I’m really looking forward to hearing all the great speakers at this conference, and I’m honored to have a chance to present with Wayne at EdUI!