Wiki: The Curse Of Xanadu

The problem wasn’t time, it was a combination of things that add up to unprofessionalism: AnalysisParalysis, bad project management, chronic underfunding most (but not all) of the time, in-fighting, and worst of all, they actually finished it a bunch of times! Back when Autodesk was funding them. But they took a perfectionist attitude, and always decided to rewrite the code from scratch every time they finished something that worked even a little bit, rather than release it. I was at AutoDesk at the time and saw working code demoed. A whip-cracking no-nonsense project manager would have changed the history of Xanadu single-handedly (if humanly possible, given the HerdingCatsProblem) — DougMerritt

Blink Estimation

I asked everyone to take an index card and to write on it, based on nothing but their gut instinct and what they had heard so far, how many people and how much time they thought the project would involve. I suspect the number of raised eyebrows outnumbered the people in the room, but I said that the whole exercise would only take five minutes and asked them to humour me. You can imagine what happened. On a count of 3 we all raised our cards, and everyone’s estimate was the same, around 6-8 people for around 6-8 months. Some were towards the higher end and some lower, but no-one was out by an order of magnitude and everyone had an opinion.

.. Then I hit a stumbling block. A client had asked us to estimate a piece of work and I had pulled a group of people into a room. They knew the drill by now and we had the discussion and did the estimation piece, and we all held up our cards. They all had a number of people and a number of months, except one card that the business analyst was holding up. Hers just had a large question mark written on it.

“What does that mean?” I asked. “It means we can’t possibly know, and here’s why.” And she proceeded to list half a dozen reasons why we couldn’t possibly know. As she was speaking, we all lowered our cards, feeling increasingly silly. She had driven a truck through any possible blink estimate. So I went back to the client and told him. We can’t give you an estimate but we can describe where we see the uncertainty, and we suggest you spend a couple of weeks investigating some of these unknowns, in order to come up with some kind of sizing.

.. In reality you can often declare mini-victories on the way through, with interim releases to demonstrate progress and validate your assumptions. It’s like firing an arrow and then painting the target around it — you start hitting a lot of bulls-eyes!