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Often, you need to provide estimates for items of work that are beyond the size of a typical Story, say an Epic or a Feature. For example, you might want to determine an overall road-map of intent and need to line that up with a calendar. This is only realistic if you have some kind of view of how long something will take. Or you might want to determine the Cost of Delay, which includes a sizing component in it, to determine what work you should schedule first to maximize the return.
The question therefore is “How do you go about getting size information for these bigger pieces of work?”
For the sake of discussion we are going to make a couple of assumptions:
In general there is a different focus in the “why we estimate” question as we scale to epics and features. At the team level you are interested capacity to take on work. At the program level the main use is to prioritize the work. At the portfolio level its to help with overall budgeting. Pictorially this is represented as:
(Note: Thanks to Steve Sanchez for the graphic.)
There are two basic ways to scale estimates:
In practice, the two approaches really are not that far apart from each other. What you will find is that even with the summated approach, you will end up with Features in the 10's (ie 10, 20, etc) and Epics in the 100's. The hard part is getting people to really do relative size estimates that include a view of risk and complexity at all levels. As a general note SAFe starts with the “Summated Story point” approach, but it is not that specific over the long haul. In fact SAFe assumes a relative size approach (not duration) as it says “Start with day is a point then never look back”.
What this means is that in most places I have worked, organizations end up with the Pure Feature and Epic Points approach where Feature Points are the Fibonacci numbers times 10 (10, 20, 30, …, 130) and the Epic points are the Fibonacci numbers times 100 (100, 200, 300, …, 1300). The other thing that organizations do is limited the highest number to 13 or 20, no 100’s etc, with the idea that this encourages people to split the work up if it gets to this level. So if there is a Feature Point estimate of “this is more than 130”, the discussion is “Perhaps this is an Epic? Or perhaps we need to split the work so that it will fit in a quarter.” This is a good discussion to have.