Agile Estimating

Estimation – Bad Advice

by Mishkin Berteig, 23 October 2011 | Agile Estimating

Here’s a fun article on PMI.org.  By omission, it gives some very bad advice about estimation.  What is it missing?  Asking the people who are going to do the work!!!  Any estimation method or approach that fails to ask the actual human beings who are going to do the work about the effort required is going to be badly wrong.  (Of course, even asking the people who are going to do the work is...
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Simulating a Project by Resampling Velocity

by Mike Cohn, 25 September 2011
Agile Estimating

I normally write about a new technique only after I’ve used it for a couple of years and have found it successful in a couple of different contexts. In this post I want to share something...
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Who Owns the Risk?

Back in my late 20′s I was a project manager in a pretty good sized IT shop. I worked under a great VP that put me in situations that were really beyond my abilities.  He fundamentally...
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Seeing How Well a Team’s Story Points Align from One to Eight

by Mike Cohn, 19 September 2011
Agile Estimating

The topic of how well a team estimates two point stories relative to one point stories (and so on) has come up in a couple of comments and replies on this blog recently, so let’s...
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The Real Reason We Estimate

by Mike Cottmeyer, 18 September 2011
Agile Estimating

Over the past few months, various blog posts have popped up talking about estimation, how estimation is unnecessary, how estimation is waste… and that maybe we should stop estimating...
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Estimating a Full Backlog Based on a Sample of It

by Mike Cohn, 16 September 2011
Agile Estimating

I want to address a question I was sent recently and that I get asked about once a month. The question has to do with how we estimate how many hours it will take to deliver a given...
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Estimating Non-Functional Requirements

by Mike Cohn, 19 June 2011
Agile Estimating

A few weeks back I promised someone I would blog about the unique challenges of estimating non-functional requirements. First, let’s remember that a non-functional requirement...
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Why Estimate?

Most people think about estimating as a way to figure out how big stuff is, so we can decide what we are going to build and when we are going to build it. More often than not, I find...
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Determining How Many Task Hours an Agile Team Can Accomplish

Note from Mike… I want to welcome Jim Magers to the LeadingAgile team.  Jim is doing a project with me in Minneapolis, and I asked him to join me here and share some of his experiences...
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5 Reasons Why You Should Stop Estimating User Stories

1. You don’t waste time on estimation Estimation takes time. Even if you do planning poker and use story points, it still takes time. What do you do to improve estimation accuracy?...
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Agile Estimating in Scrum – Why Estimate Twice?

by Kelly Waters, 29 April 2010
Agile Estimating

In my series of posts "How to Implement Scrum in 10 Easy Steps", I refer to two stages of estimating: Step 2 is how to estimate your Product Backlog. Step 4 is estimating tasks...
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Agile Software Development Estimating Experiment

by Kelly Waters, 25 January 2010
Agile Estimating

I recently came across this agile estimating experiment by Lance Walton. The article is quite old now but I still found it very interesting... In recent years, I've had quite a fascination...
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Agile Estimating: The Secret To Delivering On Time

by Kelly Waters, 2 September 2009
Agile Estimating

For decades, delivering on time has been the holy grail of software development. I've been doing agile software development for quite a few years now. I've seen many benefits, but...
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