10 Reasons Why Estimations Are Harmful in Software Development

To clarify, I'm specifically addressing software product and project development, as this is my area of expertise.

Planning in a large organization like eBay can be a lengthy and exhausting process involving hundreds of individuals. Such planning is typically based on estimations. However, these estimations are flawed and can have several harmful impacts:

• Reduced agility—teams implement what's planned rather than what's right
• Suboptimal outcomes for customers
• Broken plans and roadmaps
• Lack of testing & learning, and subsequent cleanup
• Inflated development costs due to rework from implementing the wrong solutions
• Decreased revenue and income
• Projects often running "late," which erodes trust in delivery
• High pressure to meet arbitrary dates derived from estimations and presented up the command chain as "roadmaps"
• Shortcuts taken lead to accumulated technical debt
• Product debt accrued due to insufficient time before due dates

For these reasons, we need to adopt a different approach to planning and collaboration between stakeholders and engineering teams.

Have you had positive experiences with estimation? What do you see as potential reasons for using estimations?

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