In response to a Reddit thread a few months ago -> Storypoint Estimates are a complete waste of time : ExperiencedDevs (reddit.com) … I got thinking about the different approaches to software development estimating teams can use.
Currently the team I’m in is mostly using t-shirt sizes for estimates, this gives us a good gauge on the relative complexity of one item compared to another and also forces us to break larger items into small tasks as we have only a limited number of classifications (sizes). Story points serve a pretty similar purpose too.
I’ve always found giving estimates in raw hours and days problematic as the business tend to forget these numbers are just estimates, and while the #noestimates camp is growing all the time, how does this work in practice?
To see what others were doing I decided to run a poll on my LinkedIn page asking which approach teams use for their estimates.
After 311 votes 👇🏻, story points was the clear winner …
For readers who aren’t familiar with story points this article ->
What are story points and how do you estimate them? is really good 👍🏻.
What estimating approach are you using?
