Day 61

I went into IPM today knowing that I had not the best work to show, but that’s okay. I feel as though I more than made up for it with the lessons I took back today. I’ve struggled with underestimating my projects in the past, but I’m ready to pivot how I estimate to be more fair to myself. It’s something that will be crucial to my success as a craftsmen, I can’t promise clients unrealistic timelines.

During my meeting I ended up asking Gina for some advice on how I might better estimate with caution. She gave two good pointers that I won’t forget.

The first was to ask for spike stories. A spike story is one, maybe two points dedicating to doing some research on the actual story so that I can give it a fair estimate. This typically only applies when I’m assigned a task that contains new topics for me. This would have heavily applied in my ttt-web project because I would have been able to better anticipate the mountain of refactoring I’d have to do for this project to work properly.

The second piece of advice was to spend extra time on breaking down my projects to further understand exactly what I’m committing to. What that means is that when I’m asked to estimate one story, I’ll break it up into smaller stories pinpointing the major things I have to accomplish to get the entire story done. That allows me to individually estimate each step, instead of the story as a whole. I ended up doing this for next weeks’ work which I found monumentally helpful.

After leaving IPM today I felt refreshed and ready to tackle my new tasks, more confident in the time I allotted for them. I ended my day off by watching a few videos on Advanced Test Driven Development.