You might hear about planning poker, the bucket system, affinity mapping, and other estimation techniques. Understanding the debate will help you respond to team or individual suggestions or objections.Īgile estimation requires you to come up with a methodology on how a team should develop consensus on the estimate. Getting people to estimate isn’t easy, and you will likely find people who don’t want to participate. If you are leading the charge on implementing estimates in your organization, it’s important to read through these arguments. There’s a movement around #NoEstimates and there are also experts who have weighed in on using estimates. There is some debate on whether implement agile estimation.

This cost weighting can then be used to measure team velocity, make better decisions around feature prioritization, or use to develop forecasts and roadmaps. Agile estimation aims to assign a cost factor to everything in the backlog. If you are running into any of these questions, your organization or team might be ready to implement agile estimation. More advanced teams often want to look at their overall performance across many sprints: Are they delivering higher quality when they work on lots of small stories, or just a few big ones? What’s the impact if a team member is out on leave for an extended period, or, what more can they take on if new people are added to the team? What is agile estimation Many agile tools measure team velocity, or how much teams can get done in a sprint, and teams will want to define, measure, stabilize, and ideally increase their velocity. Teams that dedicate themselves to process improvement often have related productivity and quality questions around their agile process. Leaders might ask, “Can you tell me when the feature we prioritized will be done,” or “Can you share with me a list of features that are likely to be done over the next few months?” A product owner might ask, “How expensive and complex is this enhancement,” and the operations team might want to know, “Can you squeeze in these defect fixes in the next sprint?” Īs organizations and teams mature their agile practices they are often faced with new questions. Using these fundamental practices, small agile teams can demonstrate business value by delivering incremental improvements and enabling stakeholders to weigh in on new priorities.

Practices include committing to what teams can get done in a sprint, holding daily standups to manage work in progress, hosting demos for stakeholders to showcase completed work, and organizing retrospectives to discuss process improvements. Many agile and scrum teams start with basic practices to enable self-organizing teams to better deliver on business priorities.

Agile estimating tools