I have seen a lot of conversations around estimating work. Do you use hours? Do you use days? Do you use story points?
In the Scrum Framework, there isn’t a prescribed method on how to do this. However, the following is written in the Scrum Guide,
“The Development Team is responsible for all estimates. The Product Owner may influence the Development Team by helping it understand and select trade-offs, but the people who will perform the work make the final estimate.”
I really like this statement. The ones doing the work are responsible for the estimate. At the very least, estimates should come from the team doing the work. This may be very challenging in a matrix organization and explains why estimates may be off by a large margin. Depending on your system design, there may be people outside your direct team that will be doing some work for the project. I recommend getting all the people needed to complete the project in the same meeting and discussing all the known items. Identify bottlenecks for a project upfront as much as possible. Also understand your system design if you are in a role that is responsible for communicating estimates to management etc. Bring your concerns to the table in a project kick off meeting.
When estimating work, there are many different ways to do this. Mike Cohn provides great examples in his book on Agile Estimating and Planning.
Some of the most common ways of estimating work are:
- Story points
- T-shirt sizes
- Hours
- Days
Through my experience, I have found story points to be most common.
What issues have you run into for estimating work at your organization? What estimation techniques have you tried and what were the results?