One thing I haven’t been able to wrap my head around since going Agile is how to give estimates when asked. And you will be asked. Sales likely isn’t going to care about your development methodology or it’s principles. They are under pressure from existing or potential customers who want a date attached to projects.
But doesn’t the whole Agile thing teach us that you can’t estimate with any accuracy until you break down all the work into stories and TODOs? You obviously can’t waste your teams time breaking down every single request you get. They would never develop anything. So what do you say to the sales folks? We don’t estimate until much later in the process? See how far that gets you.
I read an interesting post about this topic recently. The argument here is that since your estimates get more accurate as you break the work down into stories and tasks, you need a scale for estimates. The suggested scale looks like so (Certainty level – Estimate Technique):
- Agile Task – Hours
- Agile Story – Story Points
- Agile Epic/Theme – T-Shirt Sizes
So for those roadmap items you’re forced to give estimates for, use the T-Shirt scale (or a similar one). The explanation I attached was:
- S = hours
- M = days
- L = weeks
- XL = months