Getting Real - Estimation

Not too long ago I joined an established team and they were struggling to make and meet their commitments. Now they told me their problem was their stories weren't being completed every sprint and so leftover work was being carried over into the next sprint on a regular basis. I began to ask a few questions and discovered that their estimation technique was was the actual problem. And many of the stories were coming into the team's sprint. The planning session already sized by a solution architect and the team members were expected to implement the story just as designed and pointed. This led to them committing to work that they actually weren't sure they could complete. That's because the person estimating the story wasn't the person doing the work. The team shared that when they had pushed back on this in the past that the manager had told them that that it's the architect who knows best about how big the story should be and that they're to just do what the architect said. Well, fortunately I was able to meet with the architect and the engineering manager and explain the situation a bit. I showed how the actual stories and by story number, which ones weren't being complete and how over the course of the last three months we continue to not deliver and meet our commitments. So through a combination of empirical data, but also understanding their point of view, we were able to come to a good resolution. In this case it was including the architect and they begin attending the sprint planning sessions, contributing to the estimationist stories in real time with the rest of the team. Now you'll notice that the solution to this is inclusivity, not exclusivity. Sometimes our sort of knee jerk reaction is to just say, well, just have the architect not size the stories to sort of exclude their voice. Well, we don't want to do that either. The solution in this case was not to ignore the architect and lose her voice and estimation. Rather it was to include her in the team discussion so all voices could be heard. Just remember our goal with sprint planning with story points is to get to shared understanding across the team about the work that's presented to us. Estimation is a whole team exercise.