Planning with Estimates

There is always a chance that there will be something to do on a project that you’ve yet to experience as every project is unique. These range anywhere from having to use a completely new system, learning how to use a new program, to working with an unfamiliar face. All of these factors contribute to a varying degree of uncertainty and the more uncertainty you have the more difficult it can be to plan out an entire project’s life cycle. Uncertainty will cause you to rely on you estimating work and if you’re estimate incorrectly this can lead to an unstable project. The estimating that is done will need to be as accurate as they can be to help ensure the project completes its life cycle without many hiccups.

As you work on a project, you become more familiar with it over time. This leads to you knowing much more about just what it is that a project needs to be finished. These are things learned by working with the project instead of predicting what needs to be done beforehand. There is always a point in time when you have to make estimates about a project when you know the least about the work that needs to go into that particular project. This is known as the cone of uncertainty.

Agile approaches the cone of uncertainty differently than a traditional project would. Trying to plan everything before the project is underway can be seen to be as a waste of your time resource. You just don’t always know for sure what the project will need if you don’t have the absolute perfect requirements. Agile instead breaks the project down into iterations to help separate what needs to be done first and then working from there. The highest valued item is usually the first item on the list. From the most valued, the next would be the second most valuable items. This pattern continues through each of the project’s sprints. These smaller sprints are also easier to estimate as there is less to work with. With each following sprint there is a small, workable amount of information to organize in addition to the experience gained from the previous sprint’s deliverable. This is how agile assists in planning by estimating in smaller chunks.

Sources:

"Agile at Work: Planning with Agile User Stories." www.lynda.com/Business-Skills-tutorials/Agile-Work-Planning-Agile-User-Stories/175074-2.html. Accessed 11 Nov. 2017

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