Comment by spike021
1 month ago
I've been on teams that tried various methods of estimating and the issue I always encounter is that everyone estimates work differently, but usually people will side with the person with the most context.
For instance someone says a ticket is two days' work. For half the team that could be four days because people are new to the team or haven't touched that codebase, etc. But because the person who knows the ticket and context well enough says 2, people tend to go with what they say.
We end up having less of those discussions you describe to come to an agreement that works more on an average length of time the ticket should take to complete.
And then the org makes up new rules that SWEs should be turning around PRs in less than 24 hours and if reviews/iterating on those reviews takes longer than two days then our metrics look bad and there could be consequences.
But that's another story.
Remember, estimation is in points not days. It doesn't matter if it's 2 days work for a senior engineer or 4 days for junior devs, it's still the same number of points, e.g. 8 points. This is intentional. Skill is accounted for in the fact that a team of all senior devs might deliver 200 points a sprint, whereas if half the senior devs got replaced with junior devs the team might only deliver 100. This is intentional, so that estimation is about the team, not any person.
And yes, when there's a task that one person happens to know most, people will often defer to them. But that in itself is educational, as the experienced dev explains why the given task is easy/hard. And every task is different, so the person you're deferring to will be different, and you still often get the two or three people who know the task best disagreeing until they hash it out, etc. And very often it's another person who can point out "well it would be that easy except three sprints ago I did x and so you'll now need to do y...". And of course plenty of tasks really are brand-new so everyone's figuring it out together.
If you're really not having actual discussions around complexity in planning poker, then the facilitator/lead/manager might be doing it wrong. You do have to create an environment where people are expected to speak up and disagree, to demonstrate that this is welcomed and expected and rewarded, and not just some kind of checkbox exercise where the most senior dev gives their estimation and everyone agrees. This is also a reason why it's literally done with cards where everyone is forced to put their number on the table at the same time, so that you don't wind up with some senior person always going first and then everyone else just nodding and agreeing.
> is in points not days
I hear this often, but I've never met someone for whom points didn't eventually turn into a measurement of time - even using the exact process you're describing.
I think any process that's this hard to implement should be considered bad by default, barring some extraordinary proof of efficacy.
> I've never met someone for whom points didn't eventually turn into a measurement of time
The goal isn't to avoid time estimation completely, that would be crazy. People estimate how many points get delivered per sprint and sprints have fixed lengths of time. You can do the math, you're supposed to.
The point is that points avoid a false sense of precision: https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/estimatio...
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"estimation is in points, not days" doesn't tell me anything. Is not like tasks have an intrinsic attribute that everyone can agree on (e.g. the sky is blue)
How are you estimating the points if not thinking about how hard the task is for you and how long is it going to take you?
And then another matter is that points do not correlate to who later takes that work. If you are 5 seniors and 3 juniors and average on a task being a 3, but the task falls to a junior, they will take longer as is expected for his experience.
Here, you might want to read about it:
https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/estimatio...
Points are not intrinstic or objective attributes, like the sky being blue. The scale is arbitrarily chosen by any given team, and relative to past work. But a common reference point is that 1 point is the "smallest" feature worth tracking (sometimes 1/2), and 20 points is usually the largest individual feature a team can deliver in a sprint. So it's common for teams to be delivering something between e.g. 50 and 200 points per sprint. Teams very quickly develop a "feel" for points.
> And then another matter is that points do not correlate to who later takes that work.
Yes, this is by design. Points represent complexity, not time. An experienced senior dev might tend to deliver 30 points per sprint, while a junior dev might usually deliver 10. If a team swaps out some junior devs for senior devs, you will expect the team to deliver more points per sprint.
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I've never been involved in planning poker where everyone didn't converge on points = days at least in their own minds. "Hm, that would take me about a day, so that's one point."
Funny, I've never been on a team that did.
Otherwise, it would be impossible to have 20-point stories done in a 10-business-day sprint! Under the usual assumption that a single person is responsible for the whole story.
For the teams I've been on, a point has usually been more like a third of a day or half a day, i.e. 2-3 hours of uninterrupted concentration, and the 1/2 point card is used rarely. Sounds like you've probably used 1/2 point stories a lot more...
But this is why points are arbitrary. Each team decides whatever precise scale it wants. And it really depends on the type of work you're doing too -- whether the smallest stories tend to be things that are day-sized or things that are 2-hour sized.
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