AGILE IN ACTION

Estimates are lies and estimating is waste. That doesn't necessarily mean it can't sometimes be useful. It's still waste but used at appropriate times, in appropriate ways, and understanding the flaws in the results it can help things along with business and finance people and clients. People just have to realize that it's just not possible to be any good at estimation. The best you can hope for, and certainly what you should aim for if you have to do it, is consistency rather than accuracy. If you're always consistently over or consistently under that's enough for reasonable planning.

Continuous improvement has always been an implicit part of being agile and with the growing awareness of work by Deming, amongst others, plus the increasing popularity of Lean thinking, it is rightly becoming the center of attention. And yet, I suspect much of the continuous improvement that happens may or may not be actual improvement. I wonder if most of it proves to be negligible in the grand scheme of things.

Without really thinking about it until now, I've been seeing two types of technical debt. The first is the quick solution implemented with dirty code. I consider this to be irresponsible. That's not to say I won't do it, just that if I decide I should do it I make sure the necessary people understand the consequences and that it's an irresponsible action to take.