user stories
Estimation of User Stories With Story Points as Abstract Size Measure
Submitted by Matthias Marschall on Thu, 08/07/2008 - 21:35
Estimation of Development Time is Hard
After discussing which issues we tried to solve by introducing agile practices to manage a remote development team, using User Stories to be able to compare requirements and building a Backlog for ruthless prioritizing I want to share our learnings about agile estimation of User Stories.
As you might have experienced, estimating the time required to build a certain piece of functionality is not easy. Either you have no clue and guess "3 days" or you have a feeling it will take around "4 hours". Now what if that 4 hour story takes you 12 hrs or more? Maybe you know you're too optimistic so you conservatively estimate 8 hrs. But it still ends up taking you 12 hrs. In fact, the longer you've been a developer the more you'll come to realize that your time estimate is hardly ever right!
