> They’re also unnecessary because if you feed the system with more work as soon as software comes out, estimations don’t matter.
The question is: estimations don't matter to who? As much as I'd like a constant stream of quality features to be good enough, in reality senior managers and clients want to know what they're getting for their money, and when they'll get it (at least roughly). If your software is doing something important, it's likely that people will be depending on it and when a new feature ships can have a significant impact on how they work, and in turn, what they can deliver.
> As much as I'd like a constant stream of quality features to be good enough, in reality senior managers and clients want to know what they're getting for their money, and when they'll get it (at least roughly).
IME most of the time they need to get over it. The reality is that estimating in that kind of detail would be expensive and not worth the effort.
However what they do reasonably need is the ability to prioritise feature A over feature B and they need a vague comparison of costs in order to do that (like, is feature B going to be 3x as much work as feature A?). Scrum provides that at minimum cost.
It depends what you are working on, how you ship and how three rest of the company works. I work on Enterprise software that's not SaaS. We ship every 9-12 months. If we do it more frequently it just annoys our slow-moving costumers and increases our support burden because there are now more versions in support that might need patches. Our sales and marketing teams need to know when we ship. Sometimes costumers mighy need to adjust their own release schedules to when our next release is out. If one team needs longer for a critical feature, we need to know as early as possible so that we can discuss cutting scope, pushing the release out, cutting the feature, etc.
Yep, or if you are working on a project to build a control system for a new factory which is going live in 18 months, it's pretty reasonable for your management team to want to know that you have confidence you can build the control system within a year.
If not, they will probably want to cut the scope or put other risk mitigation in place.
> They’re also unnecessary because if you feed the system with more work as soon as software comes out, estimations don’t matter.
The question is: estimations don't matter to who? As much as I'd like a constant stream of quality features to be good enough, in reality senior managers and clients want to know what they're getting for their money, and when they'll get it (at least roughly). If your software is doing something important, it's likely that people will be depending on it and when a new feature ships can have a significant impact on how they work, and in turn, what they can deliver.