Create Your Successful Agile Project

Recognize Estimation Traps

Watch for these schedule games or estimation traps:

• The team thinks experts who “sign up” for their own stories will help the team’s throughput.

• Managers misunderstand the idea of velocity and use it as a target for the team to achieve.

• Sometimes the team thinks it can do more—with no data behind that thinking.

• Your organization wants your team to estimate the entire project before it starts delivering value.

You have options for managing these traps.

Trap: Experts Take Their Own Stories

Especially when teams start with agile approaches, they realize that they have specific expertise. Janet knows about the database schema; Dan knows about the middleware; Sharon knows the UI; and Steve can test anything you throw at ...