[User stories] Size does matter…

As a professional working in an agile environment you should be familiar with estimations of the effort needed to complete user stories.  Commonly referred to as "story points these effort can be estimated effortlessly if you relax and use well known techniques. Remember that the founder of scrum mean that story points are meaningless. Their real value is a relative value, compared to other user stories.

The team members must feel confident about the process, about their colleague and speak up! 


“The biggest risk is not taking any risk... In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.” Mark Zuckerberg

To start, you and your team need to determine a satisfactory measure of complexity and size. Example: Very low, Low, Medium, High or you could use the Fibonacci sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, …) or even T-shirt size (xs,s,m,l,xl).

Techniques:

Triangulation: Even when you know nothing you know something. You can compare, use experience, similar stories and reach an estimate.

Fist of five: The story gets estimated then everybody vote on that estimate (number from 1-5). Strongly disagree = 1, strongly agree = 5. The team members who voted 1 or 2 should explain before a re-vote. You stop the process only when everybody's vote is like or above 3.

Polling (planning poker): Each team member writes down (or holds up a card) what they think the story will take independently. The highest and lowest estimates should give explanation to the team. May be something new will be revealed. The the team can adjust and vote again and reach a consensus.

To conclude, we are only humans. Studies show that developers have a hard time estimating for others than themselves. What if the task is to be done by someone else, and what if there are a lot of ad-hoc tasks during this very sprint. Different people have different ways to manage their time and consider risks...so in reality the team member with the largest estimate might be right…If you have to choose, take the largest estimate!