It’s becoming clear to organizations adopting Agile methods that one still needs to estimate how long a project or a release of a product will take. It won’t suffice for businesses to simply take guesses or accept unreasonable constraints. We must be able to derive credible estimates, based on a history of similar projects. How can we estimate a project in advance while still maintaining the ability to manage the backlog in an agile manner?
In this article, recently published on Projectmanagement.com, QSM's Andy Berner answers that question, compares release-level estimation to the techniques used for iteration estimation, and gives some pointers on getting started with release estimation in an agile environment.
Andy Berner is a software engineer and methodologist. He came to QSM in 2012 after over 25 years in both large and small software organizations, including, among others, EDS (now HP), Rational Software and IBM. Based on his experience in almost every role in software development, Andy has consulted with numerous organizations on using software development methods and tools to improve productivity and quality.