Agile estimation is the process of approximating the effort required to deliver a product or feature When teams estimate work items at the product backlog level, estimates are relative. These relative estimates are expressed with an abstract measure like story points or ideal days.

…deadline. Mistake #2: Equating story points to hours The second mistake is when an organization tries to create consistency and predictability by insisting that a uniform definition of story points be adopted by all teams. A popular (but incorrect) way to do this is to force all teams to use…

…fan of estimating in story points. Story points are an abstract relative measure of effort. I’ve definitely got story points in mind for these tips. But they can be applied just as well if you estimate in more traditional units such as person days. [goatbot-question=What are the benefits of relative…

…a common baseline for story points across relatively large teams (a few hundred developers). In this post I want to consider whether doing so is a good idea. The need for a common baseline to story points usually arises from the reasonable desire to know how big the entire project…

…- Brian shares the story of how a manager's bug squashing endeavor led to incentivizing the wrong behavior [22:31] - Lance references Stephen Denning's statement and reminds us that assumption testing is what developers do every day. [24:00] - Referencing the State of Agile Report statistics on what's stalling your…

…to an old User Story and wondered, “what was I thinking?” On today’s episode, Mike Cohn, walks us through how and why he recently revisited and updated 200 Real Life User Story Examples from his past projects and updated a resource for you! Listen in as Mike and Brian share…

…size given in the Points row. The first set of data is for one-point stories, the second set of data is for two-point stories and so on. Looking at the one-point data, we see that the median number of hours to complete a one-point story (at this company) was 21…

…teams write a user story for this activity such as: “As a user, I want at least 15 bugs fixed” or, “As a user, I want you to spend about 50 hours this sprint fixing bugs so that the application becomes gradually more high quality.” Even a team that doesn't…

…like they’ve made two points of progress on a five-point story but also have discovered that there are eight points remaining. In re-estimating partially finished work, it is entirely possible for the new estimate to exceed the original. But should a team re-estimate at all? Reasons to Re-Estimate There are…

Using story points or ideal days to measure productivity is a bad idea because it will lead the team to gradually inflate the meaning of a point—when trying to decide between calling something “two points” or “three points” it is clear they will round up if they are being evaluated…

…develop this particular user story, but I think it will take twice as long as that other user story. As another example that's closer to home, I think pruning the trees in my yard will take twice as long as mowing the lawn. In the figure below, item B in…

…means that the user story or product backlog item meets a set of team-established criteria as to whether the story is ready for a sprint. These criteria are typically things like small enough to fit in a sprint, has acceptance criteria, and so on. You can think of a definition…

…to a particular user story or product backlog item. Common examples I’m asked about include tasks like “update the build server to use the latest version of FitNesse.” Fixing bugs from prior iterations are another common example. I’ve sometimes heard of these tasks that don't belong to a particular product…

…item estimated at 3 story points, days, or whatever units you use, is typically a higher priority than it would be if it were estimated at 100. To say this isn’t the case would mean that you always order the best wine on the wine list or drive the best…

…this. To be clear, points are relative, and it's hard to compare teams, but if a team builds project A, then is about to start project B, we can use their A velocities to predict B as long as the points are consistent across projects. If a 5-point story on…