Succeeding with Agile

The Right Data to Do This

A good organization learns to separate estimating from committing. We estimate first and then, based on how confident we are of the estimate, we convert it into a commitment. But without a good estimate to start with, a team’s commitment will be meaningless. To come up with a good estimate, the product owner and team must be equipped with the right data. Most important, they need to know two critical things:

• The size of the work to be performed

• The team’s expected rate of progress through that work

To size the user stories on the product backlog, most teams use either story points or ideal days, as described in Agile Estimating and Planning (Cohn 2005). The rate at which product backlog items are completed is known ...