I was introduced to the concept of making estimates in story points instead of hours back in the Software Development Practices course when I was in grad school at UH (taught by professors
Venkat and
Jaspal Subhlok).
I became a fan of the practice, so when I started writing todoxy to manage my todo list, it was an easy decision to not assign units to the estimates part of the app. I didn't really think about it for a while, but recently
a
todoxy user asked me
What units does the "Estimate" field accept?
My response was
The estimate field is purposefully unit-less. That's because the estimate field gets used in determining how much you can get done in a week, so you could think of it in hours, minutes, days, socks, difficulty, rainbows, or whatever -- just as long as in the same list you always think of it in the same terms.
A while back, Jeff Sutherland (one of the inventors of the Scrum development process) pointed out
some of the reasons why story points are better than hours. It boiled down to four reasons:
- We are bad at estimating hours, but more consistent with points
- Hours tell us nothing since the best developer on the team may be multiple times faster than the worst
- It takes less time to estimate in points than hours
- "The management metric for project delivery needs to be a unit of production [because] production is the precondition to revenue ... [and] hours are expense and should be reduced or eliminated whenever possible"
But I noticed another benefit in my personal habits. Not only does it free us of the shackles of thinking in time and the poor estimates that come as a result, it corrects itself when you make mistakes.
I recognized this when I saw myself giving higher estimates for work I didn't really want to do. Like a contractor multiplying by a pain-in-the-ass factor for her worst customer, I was consistently going to
fib(x+1) in my estimates for a project I wasn't enjoying.
But it doesn't matter. My velocity on that list has a higher number than on my other list, so if anything I hurt myself by committing to more work on it weekly for any items that weren't inflated.
What do you think about estimating projects in leprechauns?
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