Succeeding with Agile

Don’t Plan on Overtime to Salvage a Plan

Long ago, when I first started managing software developers, I thought it would be the easiest job in the world. In my experience, and as a programmer, it seemed that programmers routinely underestimated how long things would take. I thought that all I would need to do as a manager would be ask individuals to create their own estimates and then keep the heat on them to meet those estimates. Because the estimates would be low more often than not, I reasoned that we’d finish earlier than if I prepared a schedule for the team.

This worked quite well for the first few months. As a non-Scrum team back in the 1980s, many of the first tasks on the schedule had loosely defined deliverables. Analysis was done ...