Aug 31, 2021
Agile Estimation — I will die trying
“Agile estimation refers to a way of quantifying the effort needed to complete a development task. Many agile teams use story points as the unit to score their tasks. … Fibonacci agile estimation refers to using this sequence as the scoring scale when estimating the effort of agile development tasks.”
Here I am, another day, another path to improve my own agile practices and methods; one of the many answers I need to give is how long to complete a story or to deliver a feature for our loved product.
With that in mind, I created a short sequence of numbers that represents the complexity of the stories, linking to shirt sizes and also the amount of time in a sprint. I called it JFS Numbers!
Why I created that? Because with a Fibonacci sequence, it gave too many numbers for our team to pick, making really hard to facilitate the estimation and too much thinking on picking the right one. After some trying, we decided to go for a short sequence, where it also failed and not gave much value, so I end up with a well-reduced sequence, my own sequence😅 .
1,3,5,8 meaning S(Small),M(Medium),L(Large),XL(Extra Large)
Where, our normal Sprint cadence is 2 weeks, with that mind, our JFS Numbers would be:
1. Minimum effort to complete the story, meaning less than a half of Sprint, few days.
3. Less than a half of Sprint, not the fastest and complex task but still require some thinking and time
5. Half of the Sprint to deliver or a little bit more, requires attention and big effort to deliver
8. That’s basically our whole Sprint to deliver this task, complexity level is high and demands higher attention to testing
If we face a story where we consider higher than 8 for complexity, we would break it down into smaller stories, always following the JFS Numbers; Doing so we guarantee we will be able to deliver part of it in the Sprint and constantly add and deliver value.
If you enjoyed it, give it a clap.
