
Should developers stop estimating their tickets? - beerhacker1
https://medium.com/@samuel.fare/should-developers-stop-estimating-their-tickets-88508650fb69
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sethammons
Pointing stories/tickets/units-of-work should not be tied to time estimates
[0]. It should be a tool to break down useful deliverables into the smallest
useful deliverable, leading to less unknowns. Example: a task of "move
application from vm to kubernetes" could be reduced to smaller parts that give
the business greater insight into its progress. Maybe you have to get it
working in docker first, maybe update the integration test environment, update
the build pipeline, and maybe have a roll out strategy. Maybe any of those
need to be finer grain. The pointing of the original story might show that the
story is large and it can lead a discussion on breaking it down. Again, this
is all to provide visibility to the business side. It gives them more
confidence in you and your team compared to "we are still working on it."

[0]: if your team trends to a consistent velocity of points, it can be
tempting to start equating points to time. Avoid this.

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Boulth
This reminds me of Evidence Based Scheduling:
[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/10/26/evidence-based-
sch...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/10/26/evidence-based-scheduling/)

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JamesBarney
The reality is the business needs estimates for a couple of reasons.
Prioritization (which features do we work on), resource planning (if I want to
get x done in the next 6 months how many devs do I need), client communication
(when will very important feature X be delivered). And no amount of
organizational dysfunction will change that.

One of the biggest issues is that commitment dates and probably take this long
i.e. prioritization times get muddled. And the possible solutions are buffer
your prioritization times to turn them into commitment times or be explicit
with the business about that.

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markhalonen
I wrote this tool for uncertain estimations:
[https://uncertain.io/](https://uncertain.io/)

