We are pleased to release this recording of Linda Rising's talk on Deception and Estimation.  This is a one-hour talk, and is a good talk about how we deceive ourselves in a number of ways in life in general, and of course in the estimation process.

From the abstract:

"Cognitive scientists tell us that we are hardwired for deception. It seems we are overly optimistic, and, in fact, we wouldn’t have survived without this trait. With this built-in bias as a starting point, it’s almost impossible for us to estimate accurately.

That doesn’t mean all is lost. We must simply accept that our estimates are best guesses and continually re-evaluate as we go, which is, of course, the agile approach to managing change. Linda Rising has been part of many plan-driven development projects where sincere, honest people with integrity wanted to make the best estimates possible and used many “scientific” approaches to make it happen – all for naught. Re-estimation was regarded as an admission of failure to do the best up-front estimate and resulted in a lot of overhead and meetings to try to “get it right.” Offering examples from ordinary life – especially from the way people eat and drink – Linda demonstrates how hard it is for us to see our poor estimating skills and helps work with the self-deception that is hardwired in all of us."

Thanks to Linda Rising for speaking at ETE 2010 and letting us publish her talk.  

slides

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Sponsor Moment:

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Podcast Disclosures:

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Ken & Eric

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For the full list of developer news URLs we considered, head over to delicious.com/developernews/20

Ken & Eric

Chariot Developer News Episode #19

Hosts: Ken Rimple and Eric Snyder

The watchword this week is Release... Many releases upcoming or out, including FireFox 4 beta/preview 1, Tomcat 7 beta 1, and the upcoming Passenger 3 and GMail with HTML 5.

Links are not being loaded to delicious yet, so here they are in their glory!

• MRHaki on Groovy and clearing time from a date.
• The Road to Passenger 3.
• Firefox 4 Article.
• Apache Tomcat 7 Beta 1 is released!
• The Memory Leak protection article Ken was babbling on about.
• The mrhaki article on Spock.
• The Spock Project Page.
• Eight Open-Source Business Models.
• HTML 5 Coming to GMail.