When I hear or overhear people’s conversations on being agile, sometimes the Agile Manifesto comes up. It contains the line cited above. I am amazed how often this quote is understood as “being agile means we don’t need to plan”. Up to the point where people use “we will do this project in agile mode” to mean: “we don’t plan – we just try to be as fast as possible”.
Being an engineer originally myself, I know how hard it is to do estimates. It is even harder to do sensible ones that make sense – and can be trusted. I have usually asked my people to spend as little time as possible estimating – simply because the time spent there is NOT spent producing business value, fixing issues – or having fun 😊.
But let’s face it: most of us are working together with other people. There are other departments involved in launching products or features – operations, sales, marketing, logistics, IT – to name just the most prominent. For small features, they don’t care and we don’t need to urge anyone to estimate. For bigger features or even worse: products involving actual hardware that needs to be shipped, we don’t have this luxury. People need to align with each other and they need to work towards a common goal – the actual release.
And yes: that involves a plan. So for me that line in the agile manifesto means: when required, we will build plans based on estimates. Story points and velocity are the tools that allow us to do just that. When things change (and they often will), we will respond to this change and align with our stakeholders – rather than religiously sticking to the plan. Yes, there will be times when we don’t need a plan, because no alignment with others is necessary – and then by all means, we can and will save the time and do something more productive.
And this is what is meant in the manifesto as well, I am convinced, rather than a black and white order to “not do estimates”.