Agile estimating
I love estimating in hours! Even minutes. I do it all the time.
However, I strive to only do it in my private life. For example, I estimate the time, it would take me to cook supper so that my family gets food on time.
In my professional life, I strive to estimate the effort, complexity, the amount of work required, and the level of uncertainty. They are all summarized in a single number called a story point (SP).
That's at least how I see a story point. I've noticed some buzz around the SAFe 6 definition of a story point. According to SAFe 6, one story point is equal to one ideal workday for one person minus 20% general overhead1. To me, this seems like a potential issue with relying too heavily on time-based estimates.
Going back to cooking. The time I would estimate cooking supper is probably higher than my wife's estimate. And that's one example of where time estimates fall short. They don't work in cross-functional teams. Some people are faster and with a flair for higher levels of built-in quality for a specific task than others.
A reference recipe with known effort, complexity, amount of work required, and level of uncertainty can help people agree on a story point for a recipe. Comparing this reference recipe with a new recipe provides a relative estimate. The history of cooking similar recipes can give an upper and lower bound on the time estimate for the team to complete the task in its entirety.
This was originally shared as a LinkedIn post on Wed, 22 Mar 2023 06:15:00 UTC.
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This has since been updated in the SAFe framework. This has now been moved to a section named "Starting Baseline for Estimation" ↩