It is time to dismantle the myth of estimating and predicting the future. Here are 15 questions that will make you reconsider your requests to predict the future.
Why do things don’t go according to plan? Accurately predicting the future is almost impossible. That’s because we have an optimism bias and we underestimate the time needed to complete any future task. It’s called the “planning fallacy”.
Manager: “We need [insert any software product] to be delivered on date X. Can you do it?”
The person who actually does the job: “Well…”
This is such a simple and typical conversation in today’s companies. This blog post will describe the three important complexities at play in this situation.
People are inherently bad at estimating how much time is required to complete any kind of task. However, managers want some sort of outlook on how much the team can deliver in a certain time – when will the stuff be ready?
So how do Agile teams know when will they deliver something?