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Improving the world with software

Better software. Better questions.

Essays on software development, teams and the craft of building things that last.

Essays from August 2021

3 essays from August 2021

  1. #NoBacklogs: How to never lose a good idea by keeping the Backlog short!

    “I’m afraid we might lose all these good ideas!” This is a phrase I hear very often when facilitating a Vision and Backlog session with the teams I work with. This is true for software teams as well as for business teams and mixed business + development teams. The fear of losing a good idea …

    1 min readteams

  2. The Project Slippery Slope: why the concept of Projects lead to Waterfall, sooner or later, but inevitably…

    All that is below applies in the context that is defined here. This is not supposed to cover your personal “projects”, musical “projects”, art “projects”, home improvement “projects”, etc. You get the picture. In a company that uses the concept of “projects” to decide what to work on, fund, plan, control work (contextual boundary), projects …

    2 min readteams

  3. #NoEstimates for the perplexed – a simple principle that makes estimations obsolete

    When we think of estimation, we immediately associate some concepts that are attached to the estimation activity: listing all the work, sequencing all the work, assigning all the work, etc. All of those activities are accessories to estimation. The fact is that a task does not have an intrinsic duration, it has a duration that …

    3 min readteams

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The #NoEstimates book and its companion volumes

Chapter 1 · Free PDF

What if better planning started with a different question?

The first chapter of #NoEstimates argues that the “deliver on time” challenge is answered by a different question. Read it, and see whether it changes how you plan the next piece of work.

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