Devon C. Estes

Nearly every conversation I've been in about software quality treats it as a tradeoff with speed. You can move fast, or you can be correct, and your job as a lead is to pick a point on that line and defend it. I've never really believed in this, and with AI speeding things up further this is a bigger topic. After a few years of being the person accountable for both the speed and the quality of what a team ships, I've come to think that bugs in production aren't really the problem here. »

Today I'm taking a bit of a different track on what I'm writing about. Instead of something very technical, I'm going to talk about something completely non-technical - estimation. Estimation is one of those things that everybody wants, but nobody ever really gets, and this is something that can be really hard to explain to product folks, but I've used this example to explain our faults in estimation quite a lot, and so I wanted to actually write it down and share it with folks in case they could use it as well. »