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POAgile - Task Breakdowns - to estimate or not?
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copied!<p>During our iteration planning, we frequently find ourselves in the same position as this guy - <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/425044/how-to-estimate-a-programming-task-if-you-have-no-experience-in-it">How to estimate a programming task if you have no experience in it</a></p> <p>I definitely agree with prototyping before you can give a reasonable estimate. But the same applies to anything that needs a bit of architecture and design - but I'm not that comfortable doing all this outwith the scope of a sprint.</p> <p>The basic idea is that you identify as many tasks as you can that you're confident of, and estimate these as normal. For those areas that you're unsure of then there should be two 'types' of task identified: Investigation & Implementation.</p> <p>Investigation tasks are brief descriptions of work that you're just unsure of, for example "Investigate how to bind Control X to data". An estimate is provided for these. </p> <p>The Implementation task is a traditional rough guess, probably based on the story points assigned, of how long you think it would take to implement the feature. </p> <p>During the sprint, when the investigation tasks have been completed, the developer should then be at a stage where they have a much better idea what is going on. 'Proper' Tasks can then be identified, which take the place of the Implementation placeholder. In addition, further Investigation tasks may be identified at this stage, and the cycle continues.</p> <p>In the above example, we start with an Investigation task at 7 hours and an Implementation task estimated at 14. Once the first Investigation has been completed, Tasks 1, 2 and 3 will be identified and estimated with some degree of certainty, where Task 3 is another Investigation task from which Task 4 and 5 will be identified at a later stage. As you can see, the first Implementation estimate had delivery of the feature within 14 hours - but the reality is it took at least 4 + 7 + 3 + 4 + 2 = 20. A third more than the initial estimate. </p> <p><a href="http://www.duncangunn.me.uk/myweb/images/estimate.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer">alt text http://www.duncangunn.me.uk/myweb/images/estimate.png</a></p> <p>All thoughts are welcome - my gut instinct is this will fly - am I right or am I the Wrong Brothers?</p> <p>Cheers!</p>

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