Agile Estimation
Estimation in Agile tends to land in two camps: those that want to estimate work items as a means to roughly predict what is going to happen during a Sprint whilst Sprint Planning for example, and those that focus instead on the exhibited flow by measuring the Cycle Time at periodic intervals of how many uniform sized work items are completed when implementing the Kanban Framework for example.
This article addresses the former situation when a forward predictive estimate is needed.
Story Points
This approach of using abstract units of measure for estimates often causes quite a bit of confusion especially if teams are conditioned to use time based estimates.
Story Points are used to indicate the size of effort or complexity associated with a User Story or work item in terms of the amount of effort to complete it to a potentially shippable, or done, done, done state.
Techniques
- Planning Poker is a basic technique that allows a team to provide a detailed estimate based upon a holistic approach to complete a work item. This technique can be a little slow when compared to others.
- Affinity Sizing is a simple technique that allows a quick rough estimate to be provided, and is useful is a large number of items are needed to be estimated quickly such as when initially creating a Product Backlog for example.
See Also
- Agile Metrics
- User Stories
- Scrum Framework
- Sprint Planning & Product Backlog Refinement
- Cycle Time
- Kanban Framework