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Introduction
This book could have been called Estimating and Planning Agile Projects. In-
stead, it’s called Agile Estimating and Planning. The difference may appear sub-
tle but it’s not. The title makes it clear that the estimating and planning
processes must themselves be agile. Without agile estimating and planning, we
cannot have agile projects.
The book is mostly about planning, which I view as answering the question
of “what should we build and by when?” However, to answer questions about
planning we must also address questions of estimating (“How big is this?”) and
scheduling (“When will this be done?” and “How much can I have by then?”).
This book anized in seven parts and twenty-three chapters. Each chap-
ter ends with a summary of key points and with a set of discussion questions.
Since estimating and planning are meant to be whole team activities, one of the
ways I hoped this book would be read is by teams who could meet perhaps weekly
to discuss what they’ve read and could discuss the questions at the end of each
chapter. Since agile software development is popular worldwide, I have tried to
avoid writing an overly United States-centric book. To that end, I have used the
universal currency symbol, writing amounts such as ¤500 instead of perhaps
$500 or €500 and so on.
Part I describes why planning is important, the problems we often encoun-
ter, and the goals of an agile approach. Chapter 1 begins the book by describing
the purpose of planning, what makes a good plan, and what makes planning ag-
ile. The most important reasons why traditional approaches to estimating and
planning lead to unsatisfactory results are described in Chapter 2. Finally,
Chapter 3 begins with a brief recap of what agility means and then describes the
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high-level approach to agile estimating and planning taken by the rest of this
book.
The second part introduces a main of estimating, that estimates of size
and