Quick notes about today’s discussion, please add comments 🙂

This weeks topic was No Estimates as suggested by mr. Ville Törmälä. Discussion was good, and we were many! Though more people are encouraged to participate, so spread the word 🙂

Original announcement can be found from here.

We mainly discussed about the practicalities concerning how to work without estimates, and the actual reason for why we do estimations. Neil Killick was referenced many times, especially when discussing about using relative estimates (Story points for example) and how they differ very little from absolute estimations (hours) in practice.

One important comment on estimation was the strange connection it has to price setting: These, as Ville promptly put it, are two absolutely different things but for some reason they’re paired up to same activity in SW development industry. This causes haphazard situations when putting price tags on features, especially so if you later notice something to be changed or merged together.

Estimations are a vehicle of trust between provider and subscriber, which is partly strange since estimates have rather rough context and are mainly error prone.

No Estimates topic surely is something to explore further.