3 Agile Estimation Alternatives

Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.

  Agile   Estimating  

Does your team spend significant time estimating stories with story points? Or, does your team try to manage its estimates with support or other interruptions?

Velocity via story point estimation works in very few teams. Instead of story points, consider these other alternatives for your agile estimates.

Can you make velocity work for your team?
Gina’s team struggled with its velocity for the last few iterations. That’s when it started to work on a new product, Acme.

Acme was more complex than the team’s previous product. And, the previous Acme team—for a variety of reasons—hadn’t left full unit tests or system tests. Every time Gina’s team tried to add a feature or fix a problem, the team uncovered more problems.

The Acme team had two problems: essential complication and accidental complication.

• Essential complication refers to the difficulty of the problems the team needs to solve. If your team needs more time to solve the problems itself, the essential complication is probably higher than the problems the team solved before.
• We can’t do much about essential complication. However, we can address accidental complication—the shortcuts we took before that come home and slow the team now. For example, we might choose to take on technical debt. The longer we leave that debt, the more accidental complication…

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