I’m going to be using a metaphor that not everyone can relate to since not everyone is on a speaking circuit. My hope is that this metaphor will teach you two things: how to plan a conference talk, and how to approach doing big things quickly. When you speak at a conference, whether keynote or whatever, you aren’t asked to make estimates but rather are given a time budget. You have 45 or 50 or 90 minutes....
Let’s say that I ask you to calculate all the happy prime numbers between Planck’s constant and the speed of light expressed in meters per minute. Did you immediately start reciting numbers to me? Odds are that you did not. How accurately can you estimate the time it will take you to find those numbers? There are a number of problems encountered that slow progress and prevent estimation: Do you really understand what I have asked you to do?...
I’ve noticed that for several years now, one of the most frequently asked questions in agile forums deals with the splitting of stories. We simply can’t create a feature, epic, or improvement in a single gesture. If we are going to make progress, we have to start somewhere and build in small pieces. One way or another, whether we release after each piece or not, we have to make progress in bits and pieces....