You're Doing Agile Estimation All Wrong: Here's Why Your Team's Progress is Suffering

Summary:

1. Individual estimations (e.g., t-shirt sizing) result in inconsistent values and can't be used for team-wide evaluation.
2. A team leader estimating all tasks ensures consistency, even if minor inaccuracies occur.
3. Over time, long-term trends will show team members' progress (e.g., from 20 to 30 to 60 story points).
4. Small inaccuracies in estimates (+x% or -x%) are not important; the focus is on tracking the trend of improvement.

In Agile and Scrum methodologies, estimation is a key factor for planning and tracking progress. Often, teams rely on techniques like t-shirt sizing for individual team members to estimate tasks. However, this approach can lead to inconsistencies. Each member may have a different perspective on what "small" or "large" means, resulting in a lack of a common scale that can be applied across the entire team. This variability makes it challenging to use individual estimations for long-term evaluations of team performance.

A more effective approach can be for the team leader to take on the responsibility of estimating all tasks. While this might seem counterintuitive at first—since the team leader might not be involved in the direct work of each task—the long-term benefits become clear. If the leader estimates consistently, even with minor inaccuracies, a clear trend can emerge over time.

For instance, let’s say a team member was initially handling 20 story points in a sprint. After six months, this increases to 30, and eventually 60. Even if the team leader's estimates are always slightly off (whether +x% or -x%), the key is that the trend of improvement will still be visible. The minor discrepancies in individual estimates don’t affect the ability to track progress on a larger scale.

In essence, estimation doesn’t need to be perfect—it just needs to be consistent. Over time, the data gathered from these estimates will help the team leader track the development of each team member, giving insight into their growth and capacity to handle more complex tasks. It’s not about focusing on exact values in the short term, but rather on understanding the long-term trends that reveal overall improvement.