of course not. but if you don't follow corporate agile, then you're allowed to make estimates beyond a single sprint. are these prophetic? only in the sense of being self fulfilling. we can do is have a rough map of the work and eyeball our progress given the team we have, and try to line that up with the endpoint by working backwards.
this should give us some general feeling about risk. we have lots of ways to repond to perceived risk of failure -
- pull in a more experienced person to get a read and possibly help with that part
- shuffle the order of development to try to swallow some of the uglier pieces early
- talk with product (possibly yourselves wearing different hats), about whether we can meaningfully throw some work off the bus without hollowing out the release
- thin out some features
and actually probably several more. what corporate agile says is 'this is all too hard, screw that, lets not try to account for individual strengths, and the nature of the development process, and the sensitivity of the markets towards particular features. everybody pick something to work on for the next two weeks...and if that didn't work. well, we tried our best'
this should give us some general feeling about risk. we have lots of ways to repond to perceived risk of failure -
and actually probably several more. what corporate agile says is 'this is all too hard, screw that, lets not try to account for individual strengths, and the nature of the development process, and the sensitivity of the markets towards particular features. everybody pick something to work on for the next two weeks...and if that didn't work. well, we tried our best'