Johanna Rothman in Maintaining Project Agility has a positive take on the skill of estimating:
“In my experience, most engineers with more than five years of experience are actually fairly good estimators, they just can’t estimate the amount of weekly bureaucracy they have to deal with.”
I’ve said it before and Jonathan Rasmusson said it again:
“Let’s face it. Our industry has had some challenges when it comes to setting expectations around estimates on software projects. It’s not that our estimates are necessarily wrong (though they almost always are). It’s more that too often people have looked to estimates for something they can never give—an accurate prediction of the future. [...] The simple fact is that accurate upfront estimates aren’t possible and we need to stop pretending that they are.“
[emphasis added]
Ran across this quote recently, thought you might enjoy it:
“Don’t call your defects ‘bugs’. Call them ‘time bombs’ instead.”
- Watts S. Humphrey
From Wikipedia: “Watts S. Humphrey (born 1927) is an American software engineer, key thinker in the discipline of software engineering, and is often called the father of software quality.”
He has a recent book out that looks like it could be good, Reflections on Management: How to Manage Your Software Projects, Your Teams, Your Boss, and Yourself. Has anyone read it?
[via @jurgenappelo]
Sleep Talking Man is a catalog of quotes that Adam says in his sleep. I thought this one was about right: ”Oh, this is a one man job. A very big man with six arms and enough ears for each one of your f***ing suggestions.”
Glen Alleman of Herding Cats, Status Reports:
“Status reports should report progress to plan. Tasks and the execution of tasks are not measures of progress. The production of deliverables are the measure of progress. [...] This is a common mistake of confusing effort with results. ‘We’re completing all these tasks, so we must be making progress.’ It’s results that measure progress, not the effort.“
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