My team has being trying an approach where instead of story pointing, we break everything down into the smallest incremental tasks we reasonably can and use number of tasks overall as the metric instead of story points.
In theory it’s meant to be just as accurate on larger projects because the larger than normal and smaller than normal tasks all average out, and it save the whole headache of sitting around and arbitrarily setting points on everything based mostly on gut feeling.
I remember reading a study done across some large organizations that showed this approach was more accurate than other estimation techniques. Makes sense to me.
Huh. That’s such a simple and obvious approach, I’m kinda mad I’ve never thought of it lmao. It seems like you’re essentially breaking everything down to a 1 (or as close as you can get it), which is probably a more accurate measurement anyways. Neat.
Haha they’re just different ways of estimating the difficulty of a work task. Story points are a kind of estimate that are represented by a number. The larger the number the more difficult the task.
My company uses WAG (wild ass guess) time estimates where we have to actually say how long we think a task is going to take in a matter of days or weeks. It sounds fine but programming tasks are notoriously hard to estimate since you have to consider so many different factors. I’m especially bad at it so I’d much prefer just saying “this task is an 8 because it seems hard”
It’ll take 20 hours. Unless it’s harder than I thought. Or it’s easier than I thought. Or it’s exactly as hard as I thought except there’s one little thing that I get stuck on for 5 hours.
I recently estimated a task to take a couple hours but it ended up taking a week. Hadn’t considered having to update a bunch of other teams services with new proto schemas and making sure they were deployed before our own service 🙃
joke aside, story point can be quite arbitrary
My team has being trying an approach where instead of story pointing, we break everything down into the smallest incremental tasks we reasonably can and use number of tasks overall as the metric instead of story points.
In theory it’s meant to be just as accurate on larger projects because the larger than normal and smaller than normal tasks all average out, and it save the whole headache of sitting around and arbitrarily setting points on everything based mostly on gut feeling.
I remember reading a study done across some large organizations that showed this approach was more accurate than other estimation techniques. Makes sense to me.
Huh. That’s such a simple and obvious approach, I’m kinda mad I’ve never thought of it lmao. It seems like you’re essentially breaking everything down to a 1 (or as close as you can get it), which is probably a more accurate measurement anyways. Neat.
I’d rather story points than my company’s WAG time estimates 🥲
Man, this whole thread is like a foreign language to me.
Haha they’re just different ways of estimating the difficulty of a work task. Story points are a kind of estimate that are represented by a number. The larger the number the more difficult the task.
My company uses WAG (wild ass guess) time estimates where we have to actually say how long we think a task is going to take in a matter of days or weeks. It sounds fine but programming tasks are notoriously hard to estimate since you have to consider so many different factors. I’m especially bad at it so I’d much prefer just saying “this task is an 8 because it seems hard”
It’ll take 20 hours. Unless it’s harder than I thought. Or it’s easier than I thought. Or it’s exactly as hard as I thought except there’s one little thing that I get stuck on for 5 hours.
I recently estimated a task to take a couple hours but it ended up taking a week. Hadn’t considered having to update a bunch of other teams services with new proto schemas and making sure they were deployed before our own service 🙃
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