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by Fr0styMatt
4357 days ago
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We'd tend to do that for stories, yes; take an overall story and assign it a number of story points. We'd then try and make time estimates for each of the story's subtasks, which is where I would have trouble. Time was a bit like a currency - "We have X number of hours available in this sprint, the sprint is big enough when we've 'spent' all those hours on estimates". My experience actually matches what you're saying, in that there was always much better discussion around the number of story points and I never felt like my story point estimates were guesses. If there were any disagreements over story points, we'd at least be able to discuss it concretely ("here's why I think this task is more complex / more simple"). For what it's worth, before I was gone our process was moving more towards a velocity focus, where story points were getting more importance than time estimates. Generally Scrum was a new thing for our company and our group was one of the first to use it; I don't think they were using estimates as a whip, at least not intending to. However the business still needed/wanted concrete dates that the group had to commit to. |
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At previous companies I used time based 'guess' methods, which were all over the place most of the time. I don't think i've ever been at a company that could actually get it right.
Honestly this way of estimating really suits my team. I don't want go back to a company that picks time based estimates out of thin air then expects you to meet them. I was really bad at that, but so is everyone else.
We don't expect to developers to have committed to complete stories mid-sprint or anything. But we have generally come to expect all items to be completed at the end of sprint, simply because our capacity planning is very good at the moment. Everyones happy with estimates at the moment. We do slight adjustments based on previous velocities. When we don't complete stories at the end of the sprint, we change the capacity for next sprint rather than blame developers.
It's a lot more collaborative, rather than a hostile blame game.