Overcoming Optimism with a Premortem
I’ve been reading the excellent book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and came across a strategy for dealing with a common human behaviour problem that has direct impact on software development: overconfidence. According to Kahneman’s research, “overconfidence is a direct consequence of [how we think] that can be tamed — but not vanquished.” In other words, our brains are wired to make overconfident predictions and forecasts. In software development, this overconfidence usually presents itself in estimates of the importance of projects to the business, the success rate of new projects, and in development timelines. We all seem to have an intuition that these biases exist, but what can we do to counteract them? One idea presented by Kahneman’s colleague Gary Klein is the premortem. ...