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Showing posts from November, 2014

The Robot analogy for understanding 'relative complexity' in Estimation

We were doing some story estimation in one of the teams I work with the other day. There was a debate about the various methods of ‘sizing’ cards which followed a common pattern. “We should use story points” said one person. “What’s a story point?” Said a relative newcomer, “Is it a measure of time?”. “well, that depends, of course, some people think it should be” We went on like this for a while, talking about the merits or otherwise of some common techniques, Ideal days, Relative effort, relative complexity etc etc. I’ve certainly used all these measures and more in my time in teams, but I tend to settle on the measure of complexity as a good starting point. I think estimation, as a practice, is not specifically about knowing how ‘long’ something will take (that is important, but not the ONLY thing). Estimation is as much about the discussion that takes place during the activity. Assume, than, that we’e talked about building shared understandings etc. What I would like to