Product owners capture requirements from the business, but they don’t always understand the details of implementation. So good estimation can give the product owner new insight into the level of effort for each work item, which then feeds back into their assessment of each item's relative priority.
When the engineering team begins its estimation process, questions usually arise about requirements and user stories. And that's good: those questions help the entire team understand the work more fully. For product owners specifically, breaking down work items into granular pieces and estimates via story points helps them prioritize all (and potentially hidden!) areas of work. And once they have estimates from the dev team, it's not uncommon for a product owner to reorder items on the backlog.
Answer above is pulled from this awesome article by Dan Radigan.
Why we don’t use hours to estimate? (Story points vs. hours)
Traditional software teams give estimates in a time format: days, weeks, months. Many agile teams, however, have transitioned to story points. Story points are units of measure for expressing an estimate of the overall effort required to fully implement a product backlog item or any other piece of work. Teams assign story points relative to work complexity, the amount of work, and risk or uncertainty. Values are assigned to more effectively break down work into smaller pieces, so they can address uncertainty. Over time, this helps teams understand how much they can achieve in a period of time and builds consensus and commitment to the solution. It may sound counter-intuitive, but this abstraction is actually helpful because it pushes the team to make tougher decisions around the difficulty of work. Here are few reasons to use story points:
- Dates don’t account for the non-project related work that inevitably creeps into our days: emails, meetings, and interviews that a team member may be involved in.
- Dates have an emotional attachment to them. Relative estimation removes the emotional attachment.
- Once you agree on the relative effort of each story point value, you can assign points quickly without much debate.
- Story points reward team members for solving problems based on difficulty, not time spent. This keeps team members focused on shipping value, not spending time.
Unfortunately, story points are often misused. Story points go wrong when they’re used to judge people, assign detailed timelines and resources, and when they’re mistaken for a measure of productivity. Instead, teams should use story points to understand the size of the work and the prioritization of the work.
Answer above is pulled from this awesome article by Dan Radigan.
How to estimate story point for a very first user story of a new project?
You can choose one sample user story as a base story for your estimation. For example, as a developer, you give an estimation of 3 points for developing a login form including two simple input fields email and password. Then later on, when you have to estimate a ticket that requires you to build a shipping address form with multiple input fields (full name, phone number, address, city, …), you can feel that this ticket is more complicated than the login form, so it needs to be more than 3 points (5, 8, ...) depending on the requirement.
Which role should be involved in an estimation session?
Involving everyone (developers, designers, testers, deployers... everyone) on the team is key. Each team member brings a different perspective on the product and the work required to deliver a user story. For example, if product management wants to do something that seems simple, like support a new web browser, development and QA need to weigh in because their experience has taught them what dragons may be lurking beneath the surface.
Likewise, design changes require not only the design team's input, but that of development and QA as well. Leaving part of the broader product team out of the estimation process creates lower quality estimates, lowers morale because key contributors don't feel included, and compromises the quality of the software.
Answer above is pulled from this awesome article by Dan Radigan.
What is the team’s velocity (threshold)?
For instance, at the first sprint, the total story points that your team estimated for all user stories is 50 points. When the first sprint is finished, every team member feels that the workload for that first sprint is enough for them, then we can use the number 50 as a threshold (or upper limit) for future sprint’s estimation. When the total workload is estimated above your team threshold (or 50-point threshold), that's a signal to break or defer some user stories into other sprints.
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GUIDESProgram management vs. project managementLAURELI MALLEK
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