I felt compelled to respond to Jeff Atwood’s recent post written after reading Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management. In brief, Jeff explains that one of the main messages from the book is that as developers suffer from chronic “nearly done” or “90%” syndrome the only way for project managers to schedule and plan effectively is to get developers to list everything they need to do to finish a chunk of work and then estimate how long each of those tasks will take. If developers don’t have this list then their first task must be to make a list before they do any coding.
Well, that’s great and it would be a very effective strategy if the developer knew every single one of these tasks before they started. As I said in a previous post on estimation, the critical flaw is we don’t. We may think we know and might admit to being able to estimate 90% of these tasks, but we can’t estimate tasks we did not know we had to do and there’s no accountability for the unexpected (which as I’ve said before has an annoying habit of cropping up on an incredibly regular basis).* And what about invention?! The idea that having a list of all the things you need to do to complete a task will mean developers can provide accurate estimates is frankly laughable.
I usually agree with most of the stuff Jeff says so I was surprised to read this and even more surprised to find a similar article from Joel with lots of very disturbing graphs and charts explaining how you can accurately track velocity. There must be greater forces at work here. It’s certainly not driven by the need for increased productivity as it takes a lot of time to estimate in such detail (incredible detail if you use Joel’s “Evidence Based Scheduling” approach), time that would be in my opinion, much better spent just getting on with the work.
For me it all boils down to who your working for, your customer or your manager. I intend to cover this paradox in my next post…
* The view from this book (I haven’t read it and am only going off Jeff’’s article) also contradicts McConnell’s findings that estimates do not improve by putting more effort into creating them.
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