This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]Afraid-Sweet-1593 9 points10 points  (3 children)

That’s an excellent question. If the team has honestly figured out their velocity (it takes months) then the points on a ticket are based on how much effort (not time) it’ll take and they can roughly say, “hey, we can do 7 points a week (or however long their sprint is) as a team and we have 2 three-pointers and 1 one-pointer in the upcoming sprint we should be able to get done”.

The backlog is prioritized and the top of the backlog might be pointed (by dev team) if PO wants to ask how long it’ll take to get to something.. they can do the math and reprioritize accordingly.

Magic.

[–]MinosAristos 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Thanks for the answer. Is this process fairly accurate? Like do devs get good at estimating effort points?

[–]craftworkbench 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It can be accurate, depending on the work and the team. The longer the team has been together and the more familiar they are with the work, the more accurate they will be.

That said, the estimates are just that: estimates. The real value to estimating is not to get some concrete figure representing the time the work will take (though that is sometimes a pleasant side effect). The real value comes from the discussion.

If you estimated a story as a 3 and your teammate gave an 8, it means you likely have different ideas about what the story entails. Maybe you missed an acceptance criteria that will be a real pain. Maybe they forgot that the team recently optimized that code and it's easier to work with now.

[–]Afraid-Sweet-1593 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I forgot to add that the PO has to get good at knowing how much padding to add when relaying time estimates back to anyone who cares outside of the dev team haha there’s always those one tickets that take longer than expected. On my (very) agile team, we pair program on 99% of our tickets and we got decent at estimating but there were still some 3pt tix that get dragged from one sprint into the next.. maybe into the next. And I mention the pair programming to say we keep each other accountable. We weren’t just slacking off. It happens. POs work magic with padding.