Over the past 15 years of working with various agile techniques, practices, frameworks, and strategies I’ve found that there is one thread that ties them all together. They are all focused on improving our ability to learn and to apply that learning to our future work. Test Driven Development creates a seconds long feedback loop to help us better understand our business logic and learn immediately whether the code changes we make have the intended effect.

Every organization needs some form of planning. Public companies often plan and budget quarterly. Large software companies like Google and Apple often have launch events scheduled far in advance. Other companies need to plan their launches around training cycles. Even small startups need to have some confidence that they can deliver their product before they run out of money. The problem that each of these organizations face is how to plan effectively - and cheaply.

When creating a forecast first ask yourself whether you are forecasting One Thing or Multiple Things. It’s not always clear which of these situations you are in but the approach you take to creating the forecast will differ significantly. This post will help you to figure out which approach to take. When forecasting Multiple Things the best approach to take is to use a Monte Carlo forecast. This approach creates a statistically significant probability distribution of delivery on various dates based on thousands of simulations using historical throughput data.