Estimating

This section is a lil’ incomplete. We have a lot of internal knowledge about how we estimate and break down projects, and this is a subset of that information.

Estimating is hard. Humans are fundamentally bad at it. Being good at estimating is one reason why our customers keep coming back to us.

User story points

• We estimate using powers-of-two, e.g. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16.
• However when we’re actually building something, we strive to ensure no tickets are larger than a four, taking time to work with the product owner to break down stories into smaller pieces of functionality. This is especially important if the project is running one-week sprints.

Planning Poker

• We’ve found Planning Poker works well for giving user stories accurate size estimates.
• It should be done with as many of the development team as possible, ideally all of them, so everyone feels connected to the final estimates.
• It takes a long time, but we’ve found it always pays off.
• When we’re remote, we use our Planning Poker tool.

Velocitaire

• Once we’ve estimated story points using planning poker, we estimate our team’s starting velocity.
• We use Velocitaire to do this quickly - it’s just an estimate!