How do you measure and improve your team estimation accuracy over time?
Fellow Scrum practitioners,
I am curious about your approaches to tracking estimation accuracy and helping teams improve their forecasting abilities.
challenge i faced is Many teams I work with struggle with consistent over/under-estimation, making sprint planning unpredictable and stakeholder communication difficult.
some question for this community which i want to know:
- Do you track velocity trends beyond simple story point completion?
- How do you help teams learn from estimation misses without creating blame culture?
- Any techniques for improving estimation consistency across team members?
- What metrics do you find most valuable for sprint planning improvements?
Recently started experimenting with visual tracking methods that show estimation vs actual patterns, and it's been eye-opening for teams to see their trends clearly.
Would love to hear your experiences and techniques!
I do not track any kind of estimation trends. Estimation is a guess made at a point in time using the information available at that time. When you start working on things, you usually learn more information which invalidates the original estimate. There is no sense in trying to track estimates.
If you want to use something to make sprint planning better, switch to flow metrics. Daniel S. Vacanti has some excellent books on the practice. (https://actionableagile.com/books/)
Consider this analogy for estimates. I want to drive from City A to City B. I use a map to determine how far the journey is and estimate it will take me 2 hours with one stop to get food. Then I start my journey. On the way I encounter traffic delays from 3 different accidents, some construction, furniture that fell of a truck when someone was moving, a flat tire, and a food that took longer than expected because of a special event at the restaurant I wanted to stop at. So how could I improve my estimation ability for things that are outside of my control and not known at the time I made my estimate?
How do you help teams learn from estimation misses without creating blame culture?
To what extent are the Developers in control of the unforeseen things which compromise the estimates they make?
Do they have external dependencies, for example, which inhibit their ability to create Done work at all?