Episode 10 - Dual Estimates – Are they Mandatory?
Sridhar Rao Diagala
Enterprise Agile Coach | Release Train Engineer | Project Manager | Program Manager | Scrum Master | SAFe Trainer
In my previous episode we have seen that we can do Dual estimation to align the Story Points and Capacity which is in Hours/Days.
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Now the next question is - Are Dual estimates mandatory?
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As an Agile coach I would say it depends on the context and the experience the team has in using relative estimates.
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New Teams or New to Relative Estimations
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Let us say, the team is new or started using relative estimations recently. These are the teams which will have lot of confusion about relative sizing in terms of coming up with reference story, assigning story points to the reference Story and comparing the new stories with refence story and sizing appropriately.
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Secondly, their capacity is in Hours/Days for the sprint whereas Estimates are in Story Points, T-Shirt sizing and so on. How to align these two.
I recommend these teams to use Dual estimation. This will help them to overcome the challenges I described above.
Long Lasting Teams and Experienced in Relative Estimations
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Now let us discuss the teams which have been working together for at least a year or more and have been using Relative Estimations. These are the teams which understand Relative estimations very well and have experience working together as a team in sizing the stories in one of the Relative estimating techniques.
They might have had challenges initially, discussed about them during the Retrospection and now at a stage where their planned estimation (Planned Velocity) and actual execution (Actual Velocity) is very close with minimum variation.
These kinds of teams need not go for Dual estimations as they can start becoming an overhead and stick to only Relative Estimations. It is all about inspection and Adaption.
To conclude, the newer teams or less experienced teams in relative estimation should go for Dual Estimations and the teams which are long lasting and have good experience in Relative estimation techniques can stick only to relative estimations and need not do Dual.
Anti Pattern: Mandating every team to go for Daul estimations or only Relative estimations may not be a good idea. Understanding the team context, how long they have been working together as a team and the experience in Relative estimation should be key factors in recommendation.