Agile programming notices that we're bad at forcasting, but concludes that we're systematically bad. The approach it takes is to ask the programmers to try for consistency in their forecasting of individual tasks, and puts the learning in the next phase, which is planning. So as individual members of a development team, we're supposed to simultaneously believe that we can make consistent forecasts of particular tasks, and that our ability to make estimates is consistently off, and applying a correction factor will make it work.
Providing Slack at the project level instead of the task level is a really good idea, and has worked well in many fields outside of programming. It is analogous to the concept of insurance: the RoI on Slack is higher when you aggregate many events with at least partially uncorrelated errors.
One major problem with trying to fix estimates at the task level is that there are strong incentives not to finish a task too early. For example, if you estimated 6 weeks, and are almost done after 3, and something moderately urgent comes up, you're more likely to ... (read more)
Agile programming notices that we're bad at forcasting, but concludes that we're systematically bad. The approach it takes is to ask the programmers to try for consistency in their forecasting of individual tasks, and puts the learning in the next phase, which is planning. So as individual members of a development team, we're supposed to simultaneously believe that we can make consistent forecasts of particular tasks, and that our ability to make estimates is consistently off, and applying a correction factor will make it work.
Partly this is... (read more)
Providing Slack at the project level instead of the task level is a really good idea, and has worked well in many fields outside of programming. It is analogous to the concept of insurance: the RoI on Slack is higher when you aggregate many events with at least partially uncorrelated errors.
One major problem with trying to fix estimates at the task level is that there are strong incentives not to finish a task too early. For example, if you estimated 6 weeks, and are almost done after 3, and something moderately urgent comes up, you're more likely to ... (read more)