Yesterday in Zagaku, Eric Meyer gave a talk on estimation. None of the previous teams that I’ve worked on have used story points to manage the team's workflow, so this was a new topic for me.
There were a couple benefits to the various estimation techniques that Eric described. One of the main benefits was the entire team participates in making estimates. This seemed like it would be especially useful, since you can leverage the team’s collective experience and expertise to help surface issues that may have not been obvious to any one individual. Previous teams that I’ve worked on never really attempted to quantify how busy someone was or how difficult a project might be. We tended to instead rely on more informal metrics (often self reported) like, “Oh he has that presentation tomorrow, so he’s busy”. This was fine if the project was small and relatively straightforward, but I did find it hard to do things like measure the team’s workload and fairly divide up work once the project became more complex. Doing a formal estimate seems like it would help with both issues, since each unit of work has a jointly agreed upon metric corresponding to its complexity. Also, transparency regarding the team's’ workload seems like it would be a natural byproduct of the estimation process. Finally, I really liked how some of the systems Eric covered attempt to quantify the uncertainty surrounding the estimates themselves by providing a range of estimates for each story. The statistician in me always cringes a bit when I’m forced to provide an estimate for something and pretend as if there is absolutely no uncertainty surrounding my estimate. By using a range of estimates, I would imagine that the team can very quickly identify stories which require additional information before moving forward, as I’d expect these to be the stories with the highest variability in their estimates. Overall, it was an interesting presentation and I really liked the idea of bringing more structure to estimating and assigning work.
I started the C# version of TTT on Monday, so I think in the coming weeks I’ll get some experience creating estimates for this project. I’m interested to see how this goes.
Resources:
https://www.atlassian.com/agile/estimation
https://medium.com/@101/waterfall-vs-agile-9da25daf18e8#.68p8w7113