We have recently started following scrum and we spend a lot of time with Sprint Planning, estimating hours for task and standups. Our manager tells that apparently this is the best methodology for software lifecycle management and has been tried and tested by top companies over years. But I see that most of the estimates are not accurate most of the time and feels like a waste of time for most part. Curious to know if this is really practiced in all companies. If not, how does your team work? Please leave in the comment. Also, have you seen this method being useful?
Get use to it and start assimilating estimations
My team has been doing scrumm for about 5 years now. As you keep estimating, your team will get better at it. Reference stories help provide some context for your estimates. Going thru the process, you will get a great understanding of how much work your team can do. It's worth the effort.
I totally agree with you...
Agreed. Still. I abhor sitting in a room debating whether a story is a 1,2, or 3 hour task or (even worse) the “story point” bullshit.
I know for my team, we give tickets story points like everyone else, but we make estimations in days rather than hard hour and date based deadlines for a given sprint. SDET can afford to push off tickets to the subsequent sprint if we can't get one or two done, though
We do scrum, and we do estimates, but we follow a different estimation model, more of a relative estimation rather than absolute hours, so we use Fibonacci numbers as Story Points, and we give initial estimate on planning day, and we update the estimate continuously during the sprint, or create new tasks with their own estimates in the backlog when something is discovered while working on a story.
How much time do you guys spend on estimations? It shouldn't take that long to estimate. If it does, you are probably designing, in which you should tell your manager you need time to do proper designs. Standups should not take much time either...1-2 minutes per person. Planning is where I see most teams differ on how they go about it. How do you do your planning? Do you guys know roughly what needs to be done for the quarter/month (i.e. multiple sprints out)
We track story points with the Lou Bega scale
It's extremely useful here at Amazon. If your estimates change a lot that means you aren't estimating correctly. Maybe stop estimating by hours and do it by days? We estimate 8 days of work for 2 weeks. Leave 2 extra days for buffer or ops. If u overestimate then reduce points in next Sprint, if you underestimate you can always pick up more tasks.
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For folks marking differently, how do you guys go about this?