Estimating is a risky business.
Hey! How long is it gonna take… You know what, I'm not even gonna finish that sentence. It is a question I personally dread and sometimes even hate with the passion of a sugar’d up 8 year-old with a tantrum. Time or “relative size” (more on that later) estimations are all fun and games until a manager puts a finger in your calendar and says: “You said it would take three days”.
But let's all agree that planning and therefore harnessing the dark art of predicting the future is an important part of any project.
In this blogpost we’ll outline a new to us method of estimating. An estimation method that allows accurate estimations, even if the backlog items are not comparable. We use risk factors to quickly and methodically estimate the amount of work backlog items represent.