From the course: Agile at Work: Planning with Agile User Stories (2015)

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Using relative estimation

Using relative estimation

From the course: Agile at Work: Planning with Agile User Stories (2015)

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Using relative estimation

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- All the project planning is in hours, days, and weeks. In these meetings you'll go around the room and ask for time estimates. Often the metric is more precise than the team's ability to understand the work. So they'll end up giving you a range. They'll say, it could take one to three days. Agile doesn't fix how bad teams are at estimating. Instead the team spends much less time on this activity. From an Agile perspective, not doing something is the fastest way to get it done. The team won't think in hours, days or weeks. They'll think in relative sizing. Relative estimating compares what you don't know against what you do know. You might not be able to guess how much a truck weighs, but if you saw the truck, you can probably guess how many cars equal a truck. You might not know how much a lion weighs, but you can guess it might be three or four dogs. This estimation in not designed to be precise. But that doesn't mean it's useless. Instead it gives you a starting point, a way to…

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