I hear some people on social media saying: ‘Estimates are useless. Don’t do it!’
Claiming you can’t predict the future. That there are too many variables in software development and that it isn’t agile to estimate. We can’t take short cuts on proper code and good solutions.
But the thing is when you have years of experience, you should be able to give a ballpark estimate how long something will take. There are a lot of creative professions that also have a lot of variables in their work, and they can do it because of their experience.
When doing agile, the idea is to make small increments. So, the work should already be sliced into decent small units of work, which don’t need to be estimated, because they are kind of the same size.
And then the idea that all code or solutions need to be the holy grail: They don’t. Depending on the context and the budget we are getting, the delivered solution can be quite different.
What can you do with a budget of €1000? What about a budget of €10.000 or €100.000? I think the solutions would be completely different for the same problem.
