Mike Bria has been following the trend that's emerging in the agile community to stop estimating user stories and adopt a pull based system, Is Estimating a Wasteful Practice? The idea that you don't estimate but focus on a low variability analysis technique such as the use of a user story template like the one Liz Keogh recently proposed as an adaptation of Tim McKinnon's original, is becoming more popular. It seems to work particularly well with pull system like Kanban or Naked Planning.

Mike wrote to me in email today. So I'd like to remind everyone of the blog posts that started all of this off - from March 2005. These posts were based on observations emerging from the XIT team at Microsoft. The case study was later published at the TOCICO conference that fall.

March 15th 2005 - Stop Estimating
March 17th 2005 - Agile Estimating

At the time, stopping estimating was considered just another heracy from the mad Scotsman, FDD guy! Three and a half years later, folks as respected as Joshua Kerievsky, J.B. Rainsberger, Arlo Belshee and Amit Rathore have all been publicly saying something very similar. Perhaps, I'm in danger of becoming mainstream ;-) [Update: Karl Scotland has blogged his thoughts on how this was handled at Yahoo! in the UK.]  Technorati tag: Agile+Management, Lean, Kanban, David+Anderson, InfoQ, Mike+Bria