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alphagov / gds-tech-learning-pathway

Guidance on learning and development for GDS Technologists
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Add planning and estimating first draft #96

Closed bevanloon closed 6 years ago

bevanloon commented 6 years ago

First draft of some words about estimating and planning competencies.

MatMoore commented 6 years ago

This is really good. I like that it has solid examples of behaviours to demonstrate at each level.

Do you think it would be useful to link to some different approaches/attitudes towards estimating?

Some approaches like t-shirt sizing or fibonacci numbers deliberately try to avoid talking about time while trying to convey the relative complexity of a task, and sometimes talking about a range can be more useful than a single number. I really love this metaphor for software estimations: Why are software development estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3?

bevanloon commented 6 years ago

@MatMoore I've added a bit more detail to the introduction section with some thoughts on using abstract measures to estimate as well as a small paragraph on spikes. Thanks for the link - I hadn't seen that before. Any others you think would be useful?

I considered writing a small bit comparing waterfall BDUF to agile, but I'm not sure how useful that is in the context of GDS since we really don't embrace a waterfall approach.

MatMoore commented 6 years ago

@bevanloon cool - I think we can merge this if you're happy with it.

I don't have any other links to hand about estimation approaches so maybe we should just leave that part out for now.

Regarding agile vs BDUF - we don't need to describe agile in general but I feel like actually breaking things down into small increments is easier said than done. Maybe there are some technical aspects to it that would be relevant to this. I'm thinking of things like how to carry out a migration, which requires a lot of planning but there are patterns and approaches that make it easier. I'll have a think about this and maybe we can add something in later (it might fit another competency better).