alt Hacker NewsI am always fascinated when people tell me it is impossible to do something I have done. That plenty of people have done. For decades. But I shouldn't be surprised. Kuhn was not kidding around.
And yes, I strongly believe in accountability to business stakeholders, customers, and colleagues. I just think the better way is not paper fantasies, but demonstrated realities. Focusing on working software, customer collaboration, and responding to change, one might say. But people have said it before and it didn't make much difference.
You aren't doing what you're doing without performing what is commonly known as estimating, you just avoid using what seem like triggering words to you and the one other person who is almost spamming responses to my comments with the same information.
See "standard" vs. "schedule", and your very specific and formal definition of an estimate that is almost certainly not what anyone else has been using during this discussion and is not used in practice in most software development shops.
Kudos to you for delivering working features on a consistent enough basis that you've earned enough goodwill that people basically leave you to your internal processes and trust that you'll come through for them. I believe that's necessary to have a healthy working environment where you don't end up with what you, I, and every other software developer on earth is trying to avoid, which is an acrimonious relationship with the people with the money where they dictate what, where, when, and how we do our job.
But to claim that there is literally no estimating or scheduling taking place as you perform software development is just not true. You can post your disagreement on every single comment I've made on this topic if you want, your existing comments already speak for themselves on the matter.