Managing the art of estimation
Estimation is an essential part of software development and project management. Some people call it a necessary evil. I don’t know about the evil part but I certainly agree with the necessary part. The Scrum Guide doesn’t say anything about how to estimate the items in our Product Backlog. However, the industry has adopted some techniques that we will discuss in the following sections. First, let’s examine why estimation is so important. Having estimates allows the Scrum Team to do the following:
- Prioritize items in the Product Backlog: This happens as part of the Backlog refinement process, which we talked about in Chapter 5. There are many ways to prioritize the items in the Product Backlog and effort or size estimates are one way to do so.
- Choose which items to place in the Sprint Backlog: This happens during the Sprint Planning event, as described in Chapter 4. If we can’t estimate the items, we cannot decide...
