Questions tagged [estimation]
For questions about the estimation of the project's parameters, such as time or cost.
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Is it a good practice to use a name for a company if that name already occurs in a couple of other domain names? [closed]
Not sure if this is a proper community to post this question, if not, please recommend me one.
I had a name in my mind (let's call it <the_name_i_like>) for my website and company, so I ...
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Why are developers expected to estimate tasks at all?
This management tendency is the worst part of being a developer. Software development is not carpentry. Almost everything a developer writes is unique, they have never built that particular thing ...
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Assessing requirements to estimate costs - what order do we assess the property of a requirement?
TLDR
Is there an agreed upon PMBOK (or other) set order to evaluate a requirement's properties to get an estimate of what it will cost?
e.g. if you're creating a project estimate (any methodology, ...
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How do you estimate for a 're-build' where you are rebuilding an existing piece of software, and can agile be used?
Having experienced multiple 're-build' projects in my career, I know that it is hard to capture all of the requirements from the working software. Often because of the size of the code base and lack ...
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Time estimation of a product before developing the UI
I work at a newly found software house as an operations manager. I am currently assigned with developing a project lifecycle framework from getting the client requirements to sign off. Constraint is ...
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Estimating values in Sprint Backlog
How is value (in a scale of 1-10) assigned in Estimate of Value calculated (For instance as shown in figure below) in Product Backlog in Scrum Process?
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Should UAT estimation be more than QA's?
I am a BA for a software company and we are in the middle of building a project for one of our clients and following waterfall methodology
When I showed the timeline to the client's project management ...
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What are valid reasons for increasing the story points for a user story during or after a Sprint?
While estimating user stories, we are assigning story points based on complexity. If we get unexpected situations like server unreachable, network down, dependent items, or delays, can we increase the ...
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Sprint planning estimations and who is involved
In the past but only in 1 team, during the sprint planning, the product owner provided also an estimation for the story discussed, not so much as to use that estimation instead of the developers, but ...
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Cross-functionality is not scalable. Is there evidence that it is optimal for scrum teams, or did CF just become popular due to low "management cost"?
Is cross-functionality a concept that bleeds in any sufficiently big software-architecture?
Due to an organizational restructuring, we have been working in a cross-functional software-development ...
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What is a staff week?
I have heard the term "staff" week. I know that calendar week is the actual calendar days but what is a "staff" week?
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Estimation and days
How practical is using days estimations for stories in a sprint instead of another approach (e.g. story points)?
It seems to me that using days, links stories to specific developers only while ideally ...
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Are object point estimation and cocomo 2 application composition model deprecated nowaday?
I have to estimate the effort required for a project and I have no historical data. In college I learned these methods, but I have the feeling that they have been replaced by new approaches such as ...
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Giving high level estimates to client without commiting to numbers
I'm working as project delivery manager of a Software Development Company. Often before project initiations, a long time and loyal customer contact me directly to request 'estimate' for some works ...
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How to handle requirements with an unclear scope containing words «all», «everywhere», etc.?
Let's say, customer or product owner creates a task that looks like this:
Change localization Old term to New term in all places in the app for language X.
And development team needs to provide an ...
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Is it difficult or time-wasting for developers to adjust page design based on component design changes?
I have been curious about that how much effort developers have to make to adjust components to accommodate changes in UI design. Sometimes I think a design from UX is good and there's no problem for ...
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When T-Shirt sizing Epics, should the size be based on 1 person's capacity or the teams capacity?
My company wants the team to estimate (via t-shirt sizes) Features/Epics. When we attempt to do this, I often get asked "is this estimate based on 1 person or the entire team working on the ...
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How to approach this: Percentage change in one KPI leading to change in other KPIs?
I want to know how can I approach or model this problem. I have 7 KPIs (3 of them dependent on each other) and one main KPI (total 8 KPIs). I want to understand effect of these 7 KPIs on the main KPIs....
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How to estimate a story point, that involves Mobile team and backend team
I am Managing a mobile app product. it contains backend team, design team, and flutter (mobile) team.
User stories are usually consisting of subtasks, that involves both, backend, design and mobile ...
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Should we re-estime (reduce) story points of a task that we started but didn't finish last sprint? [duplicate]
I need an advice and it's about the best option to choose in an agile project, here is the situation :
A sprint backlog contains between 15 and 20 user stories
A the last day of the sprint, we ...
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What if My Client Won't Accept My Estimation?
I am working for a service-based company. We are working on one big project under which we have multiple subprojects.
We have been working on that project for seven years, and it is ongoing.
My client ...
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How much do you pad estimates by in software engineering?
We like to underpromise and overdeliver. If we don't pad, we become very late. I have heard some PM's especially on 1.0 projects that are much more difficult to predict will multiply the estimate by ...
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Estimating Tasks which have been split from a User Story
Let's say we have a good User Story with Acceptance Criteria and Definition of Done. But the Story is too big and needs to be split into tasks.
The team only uses hours for estimating the backlog ...
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Launching average mobile app on-time vs delayed launch with high-quality app
Apologies if this is the wrong exchange forum, it felt most appropriate to ask this here.
TL;DR What are the pros/cons of a (mobile) app (in the social media space) being launched on-time with an ...
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How should you do long term releases with Kanban?
With Scrum you can try to plan longer releases using team velocity. If the team velocity is 100 Story Points (SP)/Sprint and the Product Backlog has 1000 SP then you can say you can finish in 10 ...
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Who consumes estimates?
Consider a company that:
works on an own product(not a contractor),
the product has already been released(but is expected to need years of further active development),
the product is a consumer app(...
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Artificial decomposition in Scrum
Scrum Guide says:
Product Backlog items that can be Done by the Scrum Team within one Sprint are deemed ready for selection in a Sprint Planning event. They usually acquire this degree of ...
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What role should story points play in sprint planning?
I am the scrum master of a team that estimates its user stories using story points. The development team consists of backend and frontend developers.
Currently, what I am doing during every sprint ...
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How do you estimate the benefit of adding a software feature?
My previous estimates have generally been carried out by making a guess at what % increase a feature will have on conversion rates, or sales etc. However it's not scientific / evidence-based at all.
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Developer keeps underestimating tasks time
This is one of my first projects in charge, and I am leading a team of 2 dev, a senior and a mid-level one.
The mid-level developer is underestimating his time on most tasks. He is telling me that ...
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At whose expense is the stage of preparing a contract performed?
Let's suppose a customer needs a software product and comes to a software development vendor. The customer describes the product and maybe even provides business requirements documentation (BRD). Then ...
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How should I deal with common dependencies when estimating stories in Scrum?
There's something that has always bothered me with Scrum. Hopefully I can get some insight here.
With Scrum, we try to break the backlog down in vertical slices. Let's say stories A and B. These ...
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How to estimate sprint velocity when there is a change in story points in scrum
Initially, the Product Backlog contained 350 story points of PBIs. After completing 7 sprints of development, the Product Backlog contains 140 story points of PBIs .
The average velocity is 30 per ...
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Planning Poker Reluctance
I am joining a new team that has been struggling with sizing for years. They have not been making sprints. They have been setting their own Story Points, and historically they have correlated them to ...
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Does the scrum master also estimate user stories?
We recently started working with scrum on an new (large) project. I am a developer but do not take part in that project other than my role as scrum master.
I know about the software they use, but don'...
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Has anyone actually tried "The Bermuda plan" and if so, how did it go?
The Wikipedia page on Brook's Law includes the following sentence:
The Bermuda plan, where most developers on a project are removed ("sent to Bermuda") and the remaining are left to ...
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How to estimate amount of work/man hours for an unfamiliar task? This project is fixed bid project from customer
How to estimate amount of work/man hours for an unfamiliar task? This project is fixed bid project from customer. And most of our project is fixed bid project, for the past 3 - 4 project we are ...
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How do you estimate epics?
Let's say we have a brand new project and we want to raughly come up with a bunch of releases and its dates to give the business a vague idea of when we will finish.
Obviously we have all our user ...
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In scrum, how do you track/estimate points when multiple tickets overlap their work?
I've never been fully able to answer this question, and from a lot of searching I haven't been able to get the right keywords to find anyone who's asked this question in the way I mean it.
Say that ...
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How to better use Story Points in our teams?
I have several development teams that moved from hours to Story points 6 months ago.
Since then, we have experienced several issues with using Story Points, and I hope you can help me and us:
When ...
avish12
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Minimum number of items in the Product Backlog for an Affinity estimate
I found this question in an exam and I'm puzzled:
Affinity estimate is a technique used for arriving at a high level estimate quickly. What should be the minimum number of items in the Product ...
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How reliable is velocity?
I'd actually like to devide the question in the title in two related sub questions:
In your experience, how reliable is the velocity in letting the product owners forecast the delivery date of a ...
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Estimating when my project will be done
Suppose my project has 150 story points of work remaining to be done. Over the last 10 iterations the team has achieved the following velocities of 16, 12, 13, 5, 14, 7, 6, 12, 16, and 14. Assume two-...
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We have a velocity of zero
I am a Scrum Master for a small development team of 7 developers and 3 testers with 2 week sprints.
The product we are working on is large with a lot of modules. The breakdown of the modules is ...
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How to Calculate Effort Variance in Scrum
My team currently works in 3 week sprints and we are capturing Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for each sprint. One of the KPIs is Effort Variance (EV) per sprint
My question is at the end of the ...
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What’s the name for the estimation method where only one team member estimates at a time and others have a veto right?
This method is usually used for estimating quickly on a large chunk of user stories to get a feeling on the overall project effort or part of it. I know this estimation method has a name but I have ...
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How should a Scrum master handle disagreements about story-point estimates in Scrum?
For example : Some see its userstory (e.g. 2 points) and others see technical complications and judge that the story should be 20 points. The 2-point voters say, "I understand your opinion, but don't ...
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Is Planning Poker Bad for Software Development Teams?
We have a project manager that is adamant about planning poker. I have found that this adds stress to everyone on the team, and the times are always wrong. We have different skill levels on the team ...
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When estimating with story points should developers and QA provide their estimate based on their individual idea of complexity?
The question was as follows (and from the QA member of the team): Should I think about how complex it is from a QA AND a developer's perspective? Or just from a QA's perspective?
Since story points ...
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How to estimate delivery date with unidentified tasks
Given a software project which is complete when all of its deliverables are delivered, in which each deliverable has sub-deliverables, in which each sub-deliverable has multiple tasks assigned to it
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