It has come to the Senior Management’s attention that the project is going to overrun. No surprise to anyone…well, except the managers. So they want a new estimate of how long it is going to take.
The best way to get an estimate is to ask each of the teams, then add the totals together, right?
Well, not in their minds, no. What they did is take a selection of staff, and book 2 all-day meetings to go through all the teams work!
When I have doing pointing sessions in the past, we usually do them for 2 hours max, and by that point, everyone gets tired and switches off. Some discussions really drag on as you debate how complicated features are, but that’s only if you know the requirements well.
If you are dragged into a meeting to discuss work you have never considered before, this is going to take longer, or people are just going to give wild estimates because they are estimating with incomplete knowledge.
So is it a good idea to bring people in who have incomplete knowledge, and also force them to estimate work they don’t care about for several hours straight? Well, no, obviously.
From what I witnessed, half the estimation team was present for both days, with the other half having different members; which probably made it even more inefficient and inconsistent.
The breakdown was roughly as follows:
3 Product Owners
2 Software Architects
2 Lead Developer
2 from Product Team
and my favourite selection… 1 Apprentice Developer.
Welcome to the world of Software Development! Here’s an all-day meeting to estimate work you don’t understand, and will be embarrassed in front of the experienced developers when your estimates are way off the mark.
Stranger Coding Tings 