[brightball]

This is 100% accurate and it's the reason that I prefer the SAFe (Scaled Agile) approach to estimation and planning over the common Scrum approaches.

Doing the bulk of your planning during a 2-3 day PI Planning event lets a lot of people dive into a few things, preparing an estimate for the coming quarter, mapping dependencies across teams, lining them up with other planned work and outlining risks to the plan. Then the developers get to explain the plan to upper management, discuss any potential revisions and get moving...with everyone on the same page.

This also keeps any estimation beyond the current quarter firmly in the realm of subject-to-change.

That's the most critical part of it. Tech people and business people being out of alignment on expectations is where everything goes sideways and all of the friction comes from.

Out of all of the methodologies I've come across in my career, this is the only approach I've seen that really balances development realities with a level of "enough" future planning to help business people make informed decisions.

[tomrod]

In practice, devs are still writing code on PI days.

[brightball]

How so?

[tomrod]

With computers and dev tools, trying to get the current PI complete.

[brightball]

If that happens you’re just supposed to include what is still to be done in the next PI while you stop everything for PI planning.

There are too many people involved to just skip it to keep working.

[tomrod]

And yet!