Re:Agile Is Dead, Long Live Continuous Delivery
by lostcolony on Friday May 06, 2016 @01:39PM
(#11645453)
I'm not that dogmatic. But complexity should loosely correspond to time, I would think. A deeply complex task is going to entail more work than a simple one.
That said, there's a good reason to say it measures the complexity, and not the time. You want to keep distance between your estimates and time, or else the business people are likely to come to you and say "You said this will take 6 hours, so I expect it tomorrow". Nevermind that it requires another task to be done first, that it's blocked on getting something from another department, that you only ever committed to delivering it at the end of the sprint, and that you underestimated how long it would take anyway (but it doesn't matter because you overestimated something else so it comes out in the wash), -you- said it would only take 6 hours!
That said, there's a good reason to say it measures the complexity, and not the time. You want to keep distance between your estimates and time, or else the business people are likely to come to you and say "You said this will take 6 hours, so I expect it tomorrow". Nevermind that it requires another task to be done first, that it's blocked on getting something from another department, that you only ever committed to delivering it at the end of the sprint, and that you underestimated how long it would take anyway (but it doesn't matter because you overestimated something else so it comes out in the wash), -you- said it would only take 6 hours!