The value is nonetheless usable because it is derived from the best information available. In every or most aspect of our day to day life, we look for approximation or estimation and it helps us to take decisions in various context i. Similarly at work key objective of organizations is to make profit and agile estimation techniques customers, stakeholders and employees happy. It helps foster a buy-in from the whole team and ensure that everyone gets a common understanding of the scope and value to be delivered. Communication and collaboration is the key to maintain common understanding of scope, value, deviation from plan, revised plan etc among the impacted stakeholders. Agile Estimation Techniques Agile teams too, use estimation to help them plan and commit their work. Teams with their historical experiences successes, failures and challenges can compare their velocity against point estimates and apply their learning to predict size and complexity of upcoming stories. But with time as a team work together for a while, and attempt to size and estimates new stories collectively they start feeling comfortable with the estimation at work. Here are a few estimation techniques for agile teams that can ease agile estimation techniques transition through this phase. T-Shirt Sizing: T-Shirt Sizing T-shirt sizing is a way to practice relative sizing. I found this technique very useful to get a quick team sense about new stories. The technique is used for estimating high level stories where uncertainty can be higher. Team finds the technique comparatively easy and by comparing stories team can assign them into buckets of Extra-small, Small, Medium, Large, Extra-large and Extra Extra Large. Some teams even adopt creative approaches such as using dog breeds to estimate stories Dachshund, Bulldog, German Sheppard, Saint Bernard, Great Dane or different animals Rat, Dog, Tiger, Elephant, Dinosaur to compare stories. Poker Planning Story Points : Planning Poker Cards This is a well established technique popularized by Mike Cohn. Planning poker is a game that team members can play during planning meetings to make sure that everybody participates and that every voice is heard. To begin, each team member is given a set of cards with numbers on them. The numbers are usually ordered using the Fibonacci sequence 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55…. They can ask the Product Owner questions to clarify any points, but for the moment they will keep their estimate card to themselves hidden. The team members with the lowest and highest estimates explain why they chose their scores. Experts with detailed knowledge may be able to tell the rest of the team why a certain story is actually much easier than they thought, or why it may be more difficult than it first appears because of unexpected requirements. Usually two such iterations help the team to build common understanding about the story. As an estimation method, Planning Poker is very popular because it is fairly democratic. Every team member gets a set of cards and is allowed to play, and gets the opportunity to explain their reasoning to the others. As team reach the sprint planning stage, the focus becomes on the sprint commitment against their available capacity. Usually the sub-tasks are broken to the size where the sub-tasks can be done in 1 hr, 3 hr or 5 hr. If the effort estimation is more than 5 hr for a sub-task then team try to explore the opportunity to break down the sub-task further. Team looks to be comfortable with hourly effort estimation at this stage agile estimation techniques they are familiar with the story based on their backlog grooming, relative sizing, pre-planning experiences.
