Friday, January 18, 2008

Start estimating in ideal person days

I am aware that this title is in contradiction with my previous post. But in previous post I was more idealistic than I should be. The main problem when estimating complexity of user story with some abstract value is that you are able to give first estimation when roughly project will be finished only after first sprint.
When I woke up and came back to reality :) it became clear that in the most of the cases this is not acceptable. Customer very often wants to know at least some rough estimation about release plan, when project will be finished. Shortly, she wants some time based estimation.

From that point of view, you should estimate first set of user stories with story points that are equal to ideal person day. As soon as you have some first set of estimations you should stop thinking in ideal person days and use them as story points. It means, when you are estimating new user story, use previous estimations for complexity comparison. This way your estimations will be based on complexity factor but later on (after few sprints) your velocity will tell where are you standing according to plan.

No comments: