Story points = hours
this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025
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Guess i got a blackout bingo on this one. Oof.
So what's the actual error margin for estimating feature implementation time? It's going to be nearly the whole thing, right?
Wildly depends on the complexity of the feature. If it only takes 4 hours to implement, you might have good enough of an idea what needs to be done that you can estimate it with 1-hour-precision. That is, if you're only doing things that you've done in a similar form before.
If the feature takes two weeks to implement, there's so many steps involved in accomplishing that, that there's a high chance for one of the steps to explode in complexity. Then you might be working on it for six weeks.
But yeah, I also double any estimate that I'm feeling, because reality shows that that ends up being more accurate, since I likely won't have all complexity in mind, so in some sense my baseline assumed error is already 100%.
Hmm, so kinda O(n^1.5^) scaling? (Of the ratio between definitely required time and possibly required time, anyway, since a -110% error wouldn't make sense)
Really not sure an estimate for algorithmic complexity is the right way to specify this. 😅
But if your supposed input unit is days, then I guess, yeah, that kind of works out.
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Nah, time tracking is often needed for tax purposes: companies can write off R&D expenses
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All-day "Sprint Grooming" meeting
Do people not know how bingo cards work anymore?
Might as well put the whole Agile/Scrum crap on there while you're at it...
Disagree. My company does it well and I think it helps productivity across the board. My last job called our process agile and it was really just water-scrum-fall. Which was horrible and we devs were all miserable.
My experience with it was not like that... resources were thin but decision makers were poor at managing and simply wanted to take in the buzz to make it seem like they were doing better than they actually were. They could've made another Office Space movie about us. Needless to say, it's no surprising the CTO left and later on the top division chief left.... all the while, management kept putting pressure on making sure we fulfilled the caveats of agile/scrum even though we didn't have the bandwidth to do all of it. Documentation is important, sure, but when management makes everything a P1 just cuz they failed to see things though... well, don't find the time to put everything down in the kanban.... yada yada yada. No thanks
But, is that a problem with Agile or with your company? That's my point.