Group Project: Estimate User Stories

It is now time to begin preparations for your Group Project. The next step for group projects is to estimate the effort involved in implementing your stories.

Tasks

Schedule a 1-hour meeting for your entire project team. During this meeting, you will make relative estimates for how much effort you believe implementing a story will take. One person will have to be the facilitator of the meeting. The facilitator’s job is to read the stories, force a timely end to discussion, ensure that each team member is heard, and record the results.

For each story, follow this process (or something similar):

  • Read the story out loud
  • Discuss briefly (5 minutes max) the technical approach to the story, how you might implement it
  • At the close of discussion, each team member makes an estimate (see below for strategies on this)
  • Come to a consensus when there is disagreement about an estimate (this will require discussion, keep it brief)
  • Record the agreed estimate and move on to the next story

When making an estimate for a story, it is critical that each team member make their choice at the same time. Often, the most effective way to do this is to provide each team member with a series of slips of paper with numbers on them. I often use a modified Fibonacci series: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, infinite. Each developer selects the slip best representative of their estimation. When all are ready, show the chosen slips all at the same time.

Remember, estimation is not an exact science (or even a science at all, really). Your job is to guess about how much work you think something will take relative to any other task that needs doing. Do not think in absolute time, think in relative effort. Trivial stories should rank low. Stories that are well understood, but more involved may rank in the middle. Stories where there is significant uncertainty should rank high.

Submitting Your Work

Using whatever system you have for recording your user stories, associate the estimates with the stories. Provide links to online docs, or use the textarea to list the results in Canvas.

Each team member must provide this submission.