Tag: Estimation

After several posts around the topic of estimation and considering that estimations are often time consuming it is worth it to have a look at the alternative of not estimating at all. Therefore it is useful to become aware of why estimation is done or needed in first place. With that awareness you can asses whether these reason for estimating could be covered without the time invest for estimations. Reasons for estimations Planning right amount of work corresponding to a team’s capacity Decision making based on effort/cost versus value/benefit Prioritization based on estimated effort and uncertainty Cost calculation and budgeting of projects and initiatives Forecasting for customers and stakeholder management Release planning Get an idea on uncertainty or “readiness” of a …

#NoEstimates Read more »

Planning Poker is an estimation technique often used in agile software development. All Scrum teams I’ve worked with or met at gatherings know planning poker and use it on their projects. So I assume it is very widely spread. However, often enough I’ve seen that Planning Poker isn’t played the right way. There are certain rules for playing Planning Poker that need to be respected in order to get the full benefit of playing it. Team members reveal their estimation to each other before everyone has made an estimate for themselves. In case Story Points are used, there is often a debate about Story Points interfering the actual estimation and exchange of information in Planning Poker. This is just two of the …

How To Play Planning Poker Right Read more »

Are your estimates for the duration of tasks not accurate enough? Do you spend more or even less time than you thought you would? This is particularly unpleasant when time is limited. Accurate estimates of task needs practice. The bigger the task the less accurate your estimate usually is. Inaccurate estimates sum up and make it difficult to plan. Completion of larger work items is more difficult to predict due to a sum of inaccurate task estimates. The estimate is therefore not useful for planning. Having experienced this in several teams, I thought of a way to test estimates and improve them. This simple exercise helped to do just this. It can be applied to any task that you are facing. Before starting the task, write down an estimation of how long you think you …

Improve Yourself – Accurately Estimate Tasks Read more »

Understanding Agile Story Points or Scrum Story Points seem quiet challenging if you are only experienced with time based estimations. This post hopefully eases the situation and makes Story Points clearer.

Story Points are commonly used in Agile software development. When talking about Agile software development we are talking about Scrum in most cases, but there are other methods as well.

Historically Story Points arise from a military context, when during the Cold War the Delphi Method was developed to forecast the impact of technology on warfare. The goal was to get a forecast or estimation of probability and expected development time of a certain technology in a single indicator.

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