Wednesday 12 February 2014

Do we really need task estimation in Scrum

I came accross this question on the LinkedIn Scrum Practitioner group, asked by one of the Certified Scrum Master. (http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=52030)
Why we have two level of estimation in scrum? What purpose do task estimates serve?
This topics pinch me as I've been pondering about that for a little while:
why do we do tasks estimation and is it a good idea ?

COMPARIN FOCUS FACTOR AND TASK ESTIMATION

I also came accross this blog post recently, from one of my acquantainces:http://www.agilebuddha.com/agile/how-to-do-effective-capacity-planning-on-the-scrum-team/
The author explains the process of calculating team capacity for a given Sprint using Focus Factor, instead of total number of hours available.
For 5 people working 8 hours a day for 2 weeks :
That means the total working hours will be 5x8x10 = 400 hours!
Estimated planning for this capacity will be a disaster. It will lead to team working over time, rushing towards the end, quality cuts and low team morale.
Now let us take into account the Focus Factor of 6 hours per day:
Traditionally, project managers used 6-6.5 hours as planned hours in a day for project execution. Focus factor is team ability to remain focussed on the sprint goals without any other distractions.
The idea here is to sum up all the hours and find out how big the user story is.
Based on the capacity calculated above, you find out how many tasks and user stories can fit into a given the Sprint. Except that such estimations are far from accurate. On top of this, using tasks estimation instead of user stories does not make it more reliable.
Now come the question: Is estimating tasks in hours a good idea at all?

PROS AND CONS FOR TASK ESTIMATIONS

Let's see what people on the Scrum LinkedIn Practitioner group have to say.

PROS:

So here is my top list of arguments for those in favor of tasks estimations:
  • Task level estimation is used in the daily burndown. It is a great way to show the team where they are each day. It may take more than a day to complete a user story and there isn't a way to see the progress on that story unless you track the task hours.
  • Tasking helps the team to plan the actual work and provides transparency.
  • Task estimation allows progress tracking, and supports decision making. Will the stories really fit in the iteration (i.e. a sanity check)?
  • When it comes to sprints, burning down story points may lead to very large steps where it appears nothing is done, then suddenly a large drop. This frightens people and makes them feel uneasy as generally people want to know if they are somewhat on track.
  • If the developers are highly experienced and mature as an agile team, they can get away with relative sizing using story points. But as this is seldom the case (most teams consisting of mixed abilities/experience levels), task breakdown is welcome.
  • From a team perspective, the main reason to have estimates is to be able to detect when things start going off track. It tells us that we need to look and possibly make a decision to go back on track

CONS:

And here is my top list of arguments against tasks estimations:
  • Dual estimation using points and time is overkill (most of the time). You have to keep in mind that both of them are estimates, thus a guess on how big or much time/effort will be taken up with them.
  • The major risk of doing task estimation is it leads to falsify direct relationship, that initiate people to start to see between story points and time (time sum of all tasks = story point value of story).
  • Do we already have a time measurement in scrum: the sprint timebox. In order to find how many story points can a sprint fit in, we have to find the answer by doing, not by guessing
  • In order to start a sprint you only need enough work for a few days in advance. You don't need to break down everything from the beginning
  • There's a reason many scrum masters forego the time estimations (on any level): they are imprecise. If your story point estimation is not useful enough to draw a reliable velocity, then definitely the time estimates won't provide more details.
  • As a very rough indicator I would say each person in the team should be completing 2-4 items a day and marking them as done. More than that is too much administration which will slow the team down, and completing items less than that is too big and does not facilitate good communication and getting stuff done.
  • The Scrum Guide never uses the word task. It does use the word estimate in combination with product backlog items. So yes, according to the Scrum Guide there is estimation of Sprint Backlog Items
  • Scrum actually does not define how or when estimation should be done, but merely state that there is an estimation.
  • The more time you spend on estimation, the more it highlights the dysfunction of pressure which results in technical debt.
From the above, we cannot be convinced estimating tasks is something developers should systematically do. Let's see if there are alternatives solutions to support story sizing and sprint forecasting.

ALTERNATIVES OPINIONS

Here are some ideas, presented by LinkedInders that can be taken into consideration:
  • What I favour doing is breaking tasks into similar size, approximately half-day to day-long chunks (day long is definitely the upper limit IMHO). Then I look at burn-down by counting the number of tasks yet to complete. I don't care whether they are 4 hour or 8 hour; I don't even want to try and estimate to that level. It all averages out.
  • If you have a lot of very small stories where each one takes a couple hours and there are not many tasks on each, then by all means burn down the stories. If however, you have only a few stories and lots of task, burn down the count of tasks.
  • Task estimates are about developers planning technical work. It is less than an out-facing estimate, and more a way to plan how to approach each task, what would "normal time spent", and when to go for help.
  • Story sizing is not really about creating estimates. Ideal days, story points and relative sizes do not directly translate into hours and days. These are more for creating an understanding for the PO and the rest of the organization how much work each piece of the backlog entails.
  • We live, eat and breath by the clock and estimating the time is so ingrained in us, that we naturally want to know and predict the future, I would say the majority of people and as I count myself here, I cannot resist estimating in some form or another, even if it is a 2 second gut feeling.

MY PERSONAL OPINION

Below is what I answered to my peers on the topic. This is what I learned from 3 years doing tasks estimates:
In my opinion, when we do task estimation, we tend to put too much power into the estimations. The maths are so easy that we start believing in them: 4 tasks of 2 hours + 3 tasks of 4 hours + 1 task of 8 hours. = 28 hours! Easy, right ? No… Most of the times it never happen , even when we try to use buffer techniques it still never works out
And the PO or SM to say:
so that fits into the sprint, right ? if we look at the hours...
The answer to the question is not. Let us answer the question regarding the team: do you believe you and the team are able to achieve all this into a sprint ? Put away the hours and tasks, let us use our gut feeling. We will know that the sprint length is the only valid time period.
Although I must say breaking down a story into tasks has been a useful exercise to brainstorm and think about the solution. It might not be something we want to do all together though. Another approach is for a couple of developers to spend a couple of hours doing solution design.
I've been doing tasks estimations for so long (3 years) and I've stopped believing in it. It is often a waste of developer's time, and leads to frustration:
is it 3 hours, is it 2.5 hours ? or maybe 3.5 hours ???
Ok, let's simplify, only 4 and 8 hours tasks are allowed. Even that does not feel right: we ask hours estimations and then start to round up and put constraints on what should be a very simple task.
One thing I understood: if you depend on task estimations, maybe your user stories are too big and need to be broken down.
In the end I recommend no more than 5 user stories sizes. Something like:
  • small
  • large
  • xlarge
  • unknown : might lead to a spike for investigation

DON'T ALWAYS DO TASK ESTIMATIONS, INSTEAD BREAK DOWN YOUR USER STORIES INTO SMALLER CHUNKS

Here are, my take on the topics above based on my experience with task estimation:
  • Do task break down as a team if it helps brainstorming and designing the solution
  • Do not systematically do task estimation (putting too much power into task estimations might actually lead to technical debt and lower quality)
  • Use small user stories, not epics: a user story is an entity that can be tested independently. For example, replace "As a user I want to manage products" with 3 stories: "as a user I want to be able to create products" + "as a user I want to be able to edit products" + " as a user I want to be able to delete products"
What about you, would you use task estimation ?

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