Quality and Innovation

For 12 years, I blogged and wrote a whole bunch. For the past year and a half, I’ve let myself be pulled away from so many of the things that make me me… including writing. Today I heard one of the best anecdotes ever, and it’s the spark that will be pulling me back in. (Thanks, John.)

So here it is! It has to do with software estimation. Not only is it difficult to accurately estimate how long it’s going to take someone to do a programming (or similarly technical) task, the act of estimating often does not add any value at all. Estimation is a bad thing, especially if you’re trying to be Agile.

(And if you’re in a client/contractor relationship, you’ll have discovered that estimates are the lifeblood of the relationship, even as they drain all the life and all the blood out of the relationship, slowly and deliberately.)

Sometimes I get caught asking engineers for estimates even when the task we’re embarking on is new, unknown, uncertain, and requiring lots of learning and exploration and discovery. I should know better. But I cave, because the concept of the software estimate is so enticing: with a good estimate, I’ll know exactly how much time someone will need to spend working on a task that’s still kind of nebulous and mostly unknown. (That was a joke.)

My friend John shared the best anecdote ever today about why software estimation is so frustrating (liberally embellished):

Imagine that you’re standing on a hill looking down at a labyrinth, or a corn maze. It’s reasonably small… you can see that the corn maze is definitely doable, you can see a couple paths in and out, and the entire maze is a similar size to other mazes you’ve successfully found your way out of. So you’re pretty sure once you get to the entrance, you’ll find your way out.

But there’s no way you can say exactly how long it will take you to escape. Maybe you’ll run right through from start to finish, and it will be smooth. Maybe you’ll get stuck in the beginning, and spend a long time before winding your way out. Maybe you’ll run right close to the end, but have no idea you’re a few feet away from the exit, and you’ll get stuck there for a while.

And maybe you’ll make it halfway through, get lost, go in circles, and eventually just die in the maze.

Problem is, I can tell you how long it’s taken me to get across comparable mazes, but I have no way of knowing how long it will take me to escape from this maze, and just having another engineer in the maze to pair with me and see things I’m maybe not seeing is no guarantee at all that either of us will get us. Statistically, we’ll probably make it out, but the estimate I give you is just a guess.

Unfortunately, it’s a guess that’s going to make a lot of people unhappy, no matter what. Because even if I make it out of the maze fast this time, then they’ll expect that I’ll zoom through the next maze.

– John