Estimates vs #NoEstimates, my experience
Some time ago, I’ve heard about a new movement (or approach), to do software development without using estimates. There are many Estimates vs #NoEstimates ongoing debates on the internet. At first, it sounds like a renegade approach. Like there are some rebels against corporate “written in stone” base principles and rituals. On the second though – maybe it could make sense. Either way, it definitely makes you think about all the dust raised by the topic.
I have participated in many different type of software development projects, which involved some kind of estimations. Those were either standard task time estimations or an estimations in a form of story points. But, recently, I’ve realized that I’m actually also part of a “no estimates” kind of a project. For years.
It was not like this at the start of the project. Back than we had MS Project files updated few times a week, based on our task (re)estimations. But at some point, customer decided not to do them anymore.