Question – Estimation in the form of anything else other than time may be helpful, but we can’t use it to answer questions about when a project shall be delivered.
In our previous post, we saw that Story Point is all about the relative size of a Product Backlog Item (PBI) which depends on the amount of the work involved, complexity and uncertainty/risk. This relative size remains same irrespective of the person working on it. Essentially
Effort for any piece of work varies from person to person. One senior guy may finish a task in an hour, while an inexperienced guy may take a full day to complete the same task.
If story point has no relation with time, how do we get to know the number of story points a team should be able to forecast to accomplish?
In this post, let’s see how to do that.
Begin with a Guess
When a new team doesn’t have any historical data available around its velocity, the sprint forecast can be done based on a collaborative guess from the entire team, i.e. how many story points the team may possibly deliver in the first sprint.
This estimate can just be a collaborative guess or can be more elaborate for some teams, i.e. identifying sub-tasks of the PBIs, assign hours to them and then find out if the resultant number of hours are within the team capacity or not.
Remember, there is no right and wrong method as both methods will have a variance of 50% of meeting the sprint goal, i.e. the team will have a 50% chance of accomplishing the sprint goal and vice-versa.
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