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Agile Estimation and Agile Estimation Methods
Humans are bad when it comes to absolute estimates. How many kilograms/ pounds does a pineapple weigh? How many kilometers/miles are there between Vienna and Berlin? How long does it take to build a house? How many billion dollars of profit does Apple make?
But when it comes to relative estimates, we humans are much better. What is heavier, this apple or this pineapple? And how many apples weigh as much as this pineapple? Two? Three?
The difference in both estimates is complexity. Estimating from a faceless unit like kilometers to a real distance is more difficult than making a comparison between two real tangible things.
There are 9,105 kilometers between Berlin and San Francisco, and 325 between Vienna and Berlin. That tells us nothing. But the distance between Berlin and San Francisco is 28 times the distance between Berlin and Vienna is more tangible. That’s why newspapers like to convert facts and figures into bathtubs and soccer fields.
As humans, we have more relation to real things — and agile estimation is about exactly this fact.
It gets difficult when we are asked how long it takes to get from Vienna to Berlin. Some will say 7.5 hours by car, others will say one hour and 15 minutes by plane, and a Eurofighter pilot who is currently in the air over Berlin and is in a hurry would only need about 10 minutes with his 2000 km/h top speed.
And that is already the second important insight that you can bring into the agile estimation. It depends on who you ask and what speed they have when it comes to estimates. That’s why in the agile world we separate estimation from implementation speed and estimate in story points.
Story points are complexity-based effort estimates with an individual unit called story points for each development team/product development. You can not compare the story point scores of two different development teams.
