Notes from "No Estimates"

I recently finished reading Vasco Duarte's No Estimates after hearing about it on Dave Farley's Continuous Delivery YouTube channel and Allen Holub's #NoEstimates talk. I had been curious about the #NoEstimates movement for some time, reading an article here and there, but this was my first real attempt to understand it. The book itself is clear and direct, interleaving traditional content with an ongoing fictional narrative that motivates and reinforces the ideas. I found many connections to my research and teaching interests. In this blog post, I will share a few findings from my notes and reflections.

Estimates

One of the foundational principles of the book is fairly simple but not something I had considered before: an estimate communicates the peak of a probability distribution. For example, if I estimate a task to take two hours, I am saying that the most likely case is two hours, but it could take as little as zero or negligible time, but it could also take a low probability that it takes forever. The cumulative probability is the area under the curve. From this, we can conclude that the probability of being late is much higher than of being early.

Duarte classifies estimates as waste as defined by a Lean perspective, that more of it will not make the product better from a user's point of view. It clarifies that "no estimates" isn't a goal but a vision: estimates won't be axiomatically removed but minimized. The discussion of waste got me thinking about QA testing in games, a point I will return to below.

Managing time, scope, cost, and quality

I regularly talk to my students about how cost, quality, and scope are the three levers we can control in project management. Since our work is constrained by the semester's schedule, I point out that we cannot shift cost; that is, we cannot simply add more time to the end of the semester to be able to get our projects done. I also argue that quality is non-negotiable: the point of undergraduate education is to learn how to work well, so sacrificing that is against the telos of the endeavor. Therefore, the only manipulable lever is scope. This perspective seems to help students understand why we focus on user story analysis, prioritizing based on features that add value to the users. 

I wish I could remember where I encountered that heuristic since it is distinct from a similar concept that dominates Web searches: the project management triangle, which is also known as the triple-constraint model or the iron triangle. This model explains how the constraints of scope, cost, and time are connected such that cutting one without changing the others will result in a loss of quality. Duarte uses this model in his book to draw a distinction between value-driven and scope-driven projects. Traditional management approaches are scope-driven, where the scope is fixed and so cost and time are unbounded. Scope-driven projects instead fix time and cost, leaving scope flexible, which leads to the approach of delivering the most value first. This is a standard agile perspective, but I previously didn't have the nomenclature of "value-driven" and "scope-driven," perhaps in part because in my academic environment I rely on that alternative model described above.

Reducing variability in throughput

In Chapter 3, Duarte provides suggestions for techniques to reduce the variable in throughput for a development team. I have used many of them before in mentoring student teams. These include using stable, cross-functional teams teams; having clearly defined priorities; not passing defects down the line; standardizing and automating when possible; freezing scope within iterations; and protecting the team from outside interruptions. He also suggests reducing dependencies so that people can work on one thing at a time. This got me thinking about how often my teams end up with coupled user stories, such that completing one requires work on another. Creating independent user stories comes up more than once in the book, and it's something I can watch for opportunities to practice and teach.

Duarte points out that a good requirements  must allow measuring progress early and often, and it must be flexible enough to determine what parts will be implemented later, after the system is better understood. This leads to a discussion of user stories, that the only real metric of progress is Running Tested Stories, which he abbreviates "RTS." Teams can be managed toward consistent throughput by ensuring that there are no large stories (no larger than half an iteration), several independent stories can be completed in an iteration, and the distribution of story size stays about the same throughout.

The book references a 2003 article by Bill Wake about the "INVEST" acronym, which I had not seen before. Wake describes how user stories need to be Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, and Testable. "Negotiable" here means that they deal with the essence and not the details: they are not contracts about technical details. Wake's definition of "Small" is between half a day's effort and a day's effort. Duarte adapts "Estimable" to be Essential, which is sensible given his specialization. He includes the term blink estimation, which he attributes to Angel Mednilla and was new to me. The idea is that one makes a snap judgement about whether a story fits within two weeks or not, and that this blink estimation is usually all that is needed. Regardless of which expansion I use, INVEST may be a helpful heuristic to give to teams who are breaking down a big problem such as a game design into smaller, valuable pieces.

Planning the details just in time

I started using Scrum with multidisciplinary undergraduate game development teams many years ago, and it has been a valuable practice. I was usually the Product Owner, responsible articulating the work as user stories and prioritizing the backlog. Teams pulled stories from the Product Backlog to the Sprint Backlog during our planning meetings, as per traditional Scrum. When my teams found that a one-dimensional Product Backlog makes it hard to see the big picture, we adopted Story Maps, which ameliorated the problems. Although we tracked each Sprint's progress using burndown charts, I never bothered to compute velocity. Teams tended to get a good sense of how much they could do in two weeks by around week ten, and since I was in charge of the backlog, I could cut scope to fit into the time remaining.

My preference for agility caused some friction then when trying to apply Richard Lemarchand's Playful Production Process with my last two cohorts of game development students. Although Lemarchand calls for concentric development, he has relatively little to say about how to implement that. More importantly, his approach for each phase of production is to start by enumerating all the work that is to be done, estimating how long it will take, and then moving toward that goal. A careful reader will recognize this as scope-driven management, and a cultural observer will note that the games industry is beset by death marches and crunch. 

Duarte's alternative is rooted in agile principles: plan the details of the imminent iteration, getting them into user stories that can be completed in a day or two, and let the future work remain coarse-grained epic stories. He suggests not planning more than about two months' worth of work due to how much will be learned about the system in that time. 

This caused some stress for me since it was quite counter to one of my ongoing research projects. I have been thinking about how to combine some of Lemarchand's ideas with some ideas I took from Allen Holub's #NoEstimates talk. One of Holub's primary arguments is that we can simplify our planning, and get equivalent results, by counting each user story as a single unit of work. I have been investigating the differences between tracking work items as single units versus tracking estimated hours remaining. For example, consider these two perspectives from the end of a team's alpha phase of production.

These are two perspectives of the same period of time, an Alpha phase that lasted about three months. The first shows the number of stories in the backlog and the second shows the total estimated number of hours. The top chart shows how the team cut a significant number of features around a third of the way through Alpha. For the next third, they added stories at about the same rate as they completed them, demonstrating how they were working to reshape the project based on the initial overestimate. We set up a nifty toolchain for tracking these data in realtime using a combination of Hacknplan and Google Sheets. I even gave a workshop about this at GDEX a few months ago. But the whole thing hinges on having those planning data at the end of August for a milestone that's coming up in early December.

Duarte suggests a radically different model. Break down the problem so that the stories for the current sprint are independent and small (taking no more than half a sprint to complete). Track how many of those the team can get done in an iteration. Do that for a few iterations, and you have a good sense of how much work the team can accomplish in future iterations, which lets you control scope. More specifically, you can measure a team's User Story Velocity and its Feature Velocity, where "Feature" here is elsewhere called an epic story or an activity. 

I like the sound of that. It was clear from watching student teams try to estimate an entire Alpha phase that they knew it was shoddy. Worse, for some of them, it planted a seed in their mind that they already knew enough about their projects to plan the whole phase when, in fact, they had yet to find the fun. Switching to the #NoEstimates approach would require me to supplement or replace Lemarchand's recommendations, including new ways of using project management tools.

The medium is the message

Incorporating #NoEstimates would also mean rethinking the relationship between the developers and the artists. When I was mentoring single-semester projects with a small art team, there was seldom any trouble: artists moved fluidly from concept art, sketches, and low-fidelity assets toward production-quality assets as the semester moved on. When artists struggled to match the iterative flow of the programmers, we adopted swimlanes as recommended by Clinton Keith. 

It wasn't clear to me how to scale this up to teams where half may be artists. I reached out to Duarte himself, and he was kind enough to talk with me about my questions. We had a fruitful discussion, and he helped me see something that I didn't understand before: there is a whole category of practices that, fundamentally, are symptoms of a failure to regularly integrate. Swimlanes are one example, but there are countless more, as overt as separate physical locations and as mundane as job titles and org charts. If we consider that the running tested story is the only way to measure progress, then anything that does not support that is potentially distracting from it. It is the kind of observation that would make Marshall MacLuhan smile: the presence of a swimlane says more about the team than anything in the swimlane itself.

Using social complexity to determine tactics

Buying the book also grants access to a keynote presentation that Duarte gave some years ago. It's an excellent talk and a good complement to the book. One particular element jumped off the screen and into my notebook, and that is Duarte's matrix for dealing with user stories. It deals with the problem of Social Complexity, which can be summarized as "the number of people in the organization you have to talk to about it." Here is a quick reproduction from his talk:

This captures something I have tried to express to many teams but failed to capture so clearly. It relates to the four conclusions of his presentation:

1. Predict progress with #NoEstimates
2. Break things down by value, not effort
3. Agree on meaning with social and technical complexity, reducing risk
4. Use RIDICULOUSLY SHORT timeboxes

He points out that if you can only do one of these, do the fourth one, since it is the essential practice from which the others derive.

Closing thoughts

I taught the first two cohorts of the game production sequence, but I am stepping away for the third one. There are a few reasons behind this, but primarily it's so that my new colleague has an opportunity to try his hand at it. I expect to be back in the saddle with the fourth cohort, who will start in Spring 2026. Writing up these notes took much longer than I expected, especially as I began to reflect on the substantial differences between what I have done in the past, what I did following Lemarchand, and what I might like to do in the future. For now, I need to put down this line of inquiry, but formalizing these notes gives me a point of entry when I need to refresh myself on these topics.

In the meantime, if you have thoughts, feedback, stories, or reflections, please feel free to share them in the comments.

The Goal of Higher Education: Remarks at the BSU College of Sciences and Humanities Dean's Honor Reception

By virtue of receiving the inaugural Teacher of the Year award from the College of Sciences and Humanities, I was invited to give some remarks at the Dean's Honor Reception. The reception is later this morning, and these are the remarks I intend to give. I will be working from notes, not this written form, so the precise delivery will certainly vary, but these are the main points. Also, the original title for the talk was "The End of Higher Education," which was a pun on the two meanings of "end," but it was softened to "The Goal of Higher Education."

EDIT (Feb 2): The talk was well received. I have edited my original post to contain a few turns of phrase that I used spontaneously at the time.

In preparation for this talk, I read through two of the notebooks I keep whenever I read a book. It was purely delightful: it's like someone wrote a book that contained only things that I find fascinating, inspiring, or challenging. I hope that you also keep notes when you read. It will bring you joy to read them later.

I searched my notebooks for an answer to the question, "What is the goal of higher education?" I am sure you have your own answers, perhaps dealing with careers or impact on the world. In the Republic, Plato asserts that the goal of higher education is to love what is beautiful. I think he's right. 

You might ask, "How do we come to recognize beauty?" I put it to you that beauty is already there, that it's a transcendental property of the world around us. The question then becomes, "How do we fail to recognize beauty?"

In The Lord of the Rings, Gollum was not free to recognize beauty. Gollum could only see the One Ring. Because he was distracted by this created thing, he was blind to the beauty around him. He elevated this created thing beyond its station, and this led to his downfall. Tolkien scholar Joseph Pierce talks about how we can all become Gollumized. We can become so distracted by things that we fail to see beauty.

German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote that we are not free if we believe that technology is morally neutral. Heidegger recognized that humanity has always used technology, but he said that we are not free if we think of this technology as neutral. Take the humble hammer as an example. With a hammer, I can pound nails, but remember the old saying, "When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." It's true. The hammer has moral agency. That is to say, the hammer affects the moral decision space that you are in. With a hammer in hand, striking things with it becomes an option. The hammer has moral agency. How much more so the smart phone?

Canvas is a technology. Canvas affects your moral decision space. Canvas color codes your grades so that you "know how well you are doing." Canvas gives you notifications, so that you stop what you are doing and pay attention to it. Canvas gives you confetti when you turn in work on time. Beware. Larry Muller, in his brilliant book The Tyranny of Metrics, writes about how the calculative is opposed to the imaginative. 

How is one to recognize beauty while tempering the calculative? I have time to share with you three stories.

My friend Dannie was an undergraduate architecture major here back in the 1990s. He asked one of his professors, "How am I doing in this course?" expecting a quantitative answer. The professor took out a piece of paper and, along a line, drew an egg, a tadpole, and then a frog. He pointed to a spot on the line and said, "You're about here." Now that is a midsemester grade!

Last weekend, I ran Global Game Jam here on campus. This is an event where people get together and, in 48 hours, create original videogames. We had over 40 people attend, mostly Ball State students but also students from other places as well as community members. There was no judging, there were no grades, there were no prizes, there was no competition, yet at the end, we had made eight original videogames, which are now available to the world for free. We made them for the joy of creating them and the pleasure of sharing them. This event is a global event, and all together, this community created over 11,000 games, just for the sake of beauty.

I regularly teach a required sophomore-level programming class. In this class, I use a system called "achievements", inspired by video games, that let students earn course credit by doing things that are outside the normal course expectations. One of the options is called, "Detox," and it requires a student to go 24 hours without looking at a screen. Every semester, a few students try it, and the beauty of their essay responses would make you weep. Students have told me how they walked across campus and really heard the birdsong for the first time. Others write about how they reflect on their life, how they got to where they are, and their hopes and dreams. My favorite story is of a student who, instead of doomscrolling on Instagram, took her grandmother for coffee. There is nothing better than that.

I put it to you that beauty is all around us—well, unless you work in the Robert Bell Building, like I do, but we're doing our best. 

Look at the people on stage here. They are beautiful. Look at the people sitting next to you or behind you. Really! Do it! They are beautiful.

Speaking for myself, I don't care what grades you get. I want you to find your One Ring—because we all have them—cast it into the fire, and then join me in life's great adventure of loving beauty.

The Games of 2024

It's time again for my annual reflection on the board games I played in 2024. This year, I logged 337 board game plays, which is 71 fewer than last year's 408. I played 56 different games this year, which is also less variety than last year. The year featured several campaign games, which tend to be longer anyway, but we also had fewer nights for games. The boys have gotten involved in more activities as they have gotten older. I am not sure what this year will bring, with my oldest son likely to move out to college in the Fall semester. He's the one I have logged the most plays with, clocking in at 2,870 plays since I began logging. I am eager for what the future holds, but I'm not sure we'll ever see the same number of plays as we had a few years ago.

Here are the games I played the most this year:

• Bang! The Dice Game (19)
• ISS Vanguard (19)
• Ark Nova (18)
• Dungeons & Dragons: Temple of Elemental Evil (18)
• My Island (15)
• Res Arcana (14)
• The 7th Citadel (13)
• Crokinole (13)
• Thunderstone Quest (13)
• Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood (12)
• The Castles of Mad King Ludwig (11)
• Colt Express (11)
• Cat in the Box (10)
• Everdell (9)
• Heat: Pedal to the Metal (9)

I usually just report on the "dimes"—the games I played ten or more times during the year. However, I included those last two because they provide an interesting story. Many of those games of Everdell were with my youngest son, who seems to have the same kind of love of systems-based games as my oldest son and I do. He and I end up together on Monday nights when the other boys are at Scouts. Seeing him grow into a more mature player, we started by exploring two-player Everdell. He's not yet ten and still misses some opportunities, but he's a chipper kid at the table, always happy to learn something and never bitter when things don't go his way. We played a bunch of Res Arcana together, which is light enough to do two or three rounds in an evening. Last Fall, we moved into Temple of Elemental Evil, the campaign for which I have played twice now. Seriously, I have played Temple of Elemental Evil 46 times, which is a lot more than anyone should play it. At least the miniatures I painted years ago still look great, and I think maybe I can finally put the game to rest. Just before Christmas, we moved on to  a cooperative campaign in Imperial Assault, and I suspect we might move on to other similar games soon.

Heat: Pedal to the Medal was one we just got for Christmas after playing once with my brother at a family get-together. It's proven to be a big hit with my family, easily accommodating six players without getting too slow. 

It's a little sad for me to see Bang! The Dice Game in the number one slot because I don't really care for it. However, it travels well, so we brought it with on a family trip, and when it's all you have and the hotel has game-sized tables, it's what you play. Castles of Mad King Ludwig is in there in part because I splurged this year, replacing my original edition with the nice new second printing. There are a few aspects of the visual redesign that I do not care for, but it's worth it for the ease of setup and teardown that are made possible by the excellent packaging.

As I mentioned in the introduction, there were a lot of campaign games this year. My two oldest sons, my wife, and I just wrapped up The 7th Citadel before Christmas after having set it aside months earlier. It is a strong sequel to The 7th Continent, which the four of us also played, and I look forward to trying the other threat (campaign setting) that came with the core box. My two older boys and I played Oathsworn and ISS Vanguard together. Oathsworn was fun but had a few disappointing narrative beats; it's in my closet should we want to go back to it, but I have mixed feelings about how likely that will be. On the other hand, we are looking forward to getting back into ISS Vanguard once we paint the rest of the miniatures from its expansion.

I am shocked to see that we logged only eight plays of games in the Clank series this year. There were many nights where somebody suggested it and I turned us toward something else, feeling a bit Clanked out. It is the series that my family has played the most, by far. Perhaps it is the relative dearth of Clank that has me so excited to get into Clank Legacy 2, for which my boys and I have already painted our figures and are just waiting the chance to get to the table.

During 2024, my games h-index grew from 33 to 35, meaning that there are now 35 games that I have played 35 times or more. I would have to play a lot of games in order for another play of Temple of Elemental Evil to shift that. My player h-index remained at 19, which is not surprising since I have mostly continued to play with my family. Indeed, it's hard to imagine what would need to happen to change that number dramatically. 

Although it was a record low for board games this year, it was also a record high for tabletop role-playing games. We played Microscope, Grok?!, and Blades in the Dark, and we played five games of a campaign in Scum and Villainy. These were all a lot of fun, and I hope that we can do some more tabletop RPGs in the new year.

That's the summary of my tabletop games for 2024. Thanks for reading, and please feel free to share some of your favorite gaming memories of the year with me—either in the comments or over a cup of coffee.