[andrewprock]

Advocating process solutions over people solutions is precisely non-agile. If people are burning out, then you need to address that.

Estimation is hard. Accurate estimation is even harder. Doing it in the face of noon stationary scope is a fools game.

Who is in charge of estimating how long it will take to correctly break down a problem into accurately estimable sizes?

[pas]

Initial estimation (over many sprints, with either a greenfield project or with a new dev team) is always very hard, almost a completely foolish attempt.

After the first few sprints the uncertainty reduces.

And after the team gains experience with the system (business domain + codebase + infrastructure - if applicable), they are much better at scoring tickets (SCRUM poker), which then can be converted back to time from points.

Directly estimating time (asking for time estimate from programmers) is just something that never works (or if it does, then it means the programmers does the following adjustment internally), as humans get into the confusion of constantly having to recalculate their intuitive feeling of required time based on how long actually that took the last time they felt that.

[mattmanser]

It doesn't have to be accurate it just has to be order-of-magnitude right. We're talking about a rough estimate of how much feature X costs.

If something costs 15k instead of 10k, that's understandable, if you estimated 10k and it ultimately costs 1.5 million to develop, obviously not.

[v-erne]

50% off is understandable ? Where can I find such forgiving clients? My clients lawyers would eat me alive if I would start to bill them in such manner. They dont want to hear about uncertainty - they are buying professionals and this kind of estimations looks to them like we dont know what we are doing.

[AlexCoventry]

Maybe if you're building the nth monitoring dashboard or something. The work I find interesting is inherently uncertain, though.

[v-erne]

Sure we all know this, but for business people with money this looks fishy. This xkcd sums up the problem perfectly: https://xkcd.com/1425/

How non technical person can tell the difference between task inherent uncertainty and Your incopetence? They cant that's why they will buy Your competition that will claim there is no uncertainty.