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Reliable estimates benefit developers by allowing them to work at a sustainable pace. This leads to higher-quality code and fewer bugs. These, in turn, lead back to more reliable estimates because less time is spent on highly unpredictable work such as bug fixing.
“No plan survives contact with the enemy.”
Nearly two-thirds of projects significantly overrun their cost estimates (Lederer and Prasad 1992) • Sixty-four percent of the features included in products are rarely or never used (Johnson 2002) • The average project exceeds its schedule by 100% (Standish 2001)
The plan created at the start of any project is not a guarantee of what will occur. In fact, it is only a point-in-time guess.
The beauty of this is that estimating in story points completely separates the estimation of effort from the estimation of duration. Of course, effort and schedule are related, but separating them allows each to be estimated independently.
However, the two best solutions to allocating points for incomplete stories are not to have any incomplete stories and to use sufficiently small stories that partial credit isn’t an issue.
She joked that the only downside to not implementing the feature was that the CEO might spend some time in prison. And she (because she wasn’t the CEO) was OK with that risk if it meant getting other features into the product instead.
