Agile Estimation Paper

Thank you for working with AA Consulting this past month and allowing us the opportunity to work with your IT Development Team observing their current Agile practices. Throughout this week we had the privilege to sit in on Agile Ceremonies across several teams. When we were first engaged to provide support for Agile Development, the area of concern for management and product owners was the realm of estimations. As such, the area that our consulting team placed focus on was during the Backlog Grooming and Estimation sessions. Our goal was to understand why for the past 6 months development teams have provided inconsistent estimations, derailing project timelines and costing Company X almost 175% of their predicted development costs for the quarter.

It is understood that you are familiar with the Agile process, but before proceeding with our analysis it is imperative that there is a shared understanding of
Please see the following for our observations and recommendations as it pertains to Agile Estimation. Agile Estimation Challenges and Techniques

Introduction

Agile estimation is defined as the, “quantified evaluation of the effort necessary to carry out a given development task” (Source). For Company X, estimation is done by asking the lead developer what their thoughts are for a story and assigning the provided number without any further conversation. At the end of sprints there is often work that is left uncompleted, due to inaccurate estimations. As a result, for the past 6 months Company X has exceeded their project budgets by over 175% and delivered work to their aligned business partners consistently behind schedule.

Estimation Areas of Opportunity AA Consulting observed team behaviors during meetings and estimation sessions and determined three major areas of opportunity for Company X during estimation sessions.

Equate Story Points to