What's the best resource for learning about Evidence-based Scheduling?

Question

Spolsky goes on and on about evidence-based scheduling (EBS) on the StackOverflow podcast, and it's to the point where I feel like he's trying to tell me something, so I want to try it out. I'm looking for a resource that will not only tell me how to do EBS, but also give me some anecdotal info on how it works with different kinds of teams, particularly those working in a corporate/enterprise environment.

Answer 1

Try this link for starters:

http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBUGZ/docs/70/topics/schedules/Evidence-BasedScheduling.html

It includes some examples of why it works so well.

Also, See Joel's original post about it:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html

From the link above: FogBugz uses a sophisticated statistical algorithm called Evidence-Based Scheduling (EBS) to produce ship date probability distributions. EBS was developed at Fog Creek Software, and is exclusive to FogBugz.

Answer 2

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html

There is nothing else I have seen on this method.

Answer 3

Well, there's his own post for starters. And there's a whitepaper on EBS linking from the FogBugz site.

Largely, it seems that most of the content available is in some roundabout way attributable back to Joel.

The approach itself is apparently a derivation of the Monte Carlo method for estimating, which you might also want to look at.