Part 3 of my Exploration of Estimation

In part 1, I posed the question of Why are you estimating! I hope that you thought about it and may have found an answer or two.

Part 2 explored What are we estimating. Usually we are asked to estimate effort (cost) which is then turned into a schedule (duration) which are two very different things.

The next question I’d to explore is Who is doing the estimating?

In my experience,  normally it is the technical people who will be doing the actually work (coding, sql, ux, etc) that are asked to provide an estimate. Developers are the best and most familiar example. And while at first glance this seems reasonable, when you start to dig into the entire workflow required to move an idea to reality in software, it begins to look a bit inadequate.

As we can see in the workflow, there are several phases of life that a feature/user story/use case goes from to be brought to life, only one of which is development. Often, there are many tasks across elaboration/analysis, development,  quality assurance, user acceptance and IT/Ops just to name a few common phases. Are developers performing all of these tasks? Do they take into account the effort required in all of the other disciplines when they do their estimates?

So why is it that developers are usually the only ones estimating effort?

Surely developers aren’t the only one working on your projects!! (Don’t get me wrong. I was a developer growing up, so I’ve definitely thought that the software development workflow revolved around me!) But this is a team sport, and without the business analysts, QA professionals, IT professionals and what ever other role is in your delivery workflow, we may have a difficult if not impossible time getting our software out the door!

So as a part of your estimation process, how do you understand the effort and/or time required to get work through the entire delivery process?  Do you take into account all of the phases of life, and hand-offs, and interactions in your delivery process? Do you get all of the people involved in the estimation process? In fact, I’ve seen (not often) teams involve a tester in the estimation efforts, but very infrequently do I see analysts, DBAs or IT/Ops folks involved in the process, even when they’re role is critical to the delivery of the product!

So who is involved in YOUR estimation process? Do you have all the people you should have involved?

And are you asking yourself this question in conjunction with the other two questions I’ve already asked you about? Hmmm….. I hope you’re all thinking about all of these questions! I hope to present a couple more questions in the next week and then start to tell you how I think we can start make some real changes in the way that we do all of this estimation stuff!!