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how_can_we_scale_our_estimating_approach_beyond_a_team

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How Can We Scale Our Estimating Approach Beyond a Team?

Most of the discussion around What Can We Do To Improve Our Point Based Estimates? is around team based estimation. 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 roadmap of intent and need to line that up with a calendar which 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.

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:

  • We are going to use the basic SAFe structure of stories (less than two weeks), features (less than a quarter), and epics (more than a quarter). While the discussion is related to SAFe, there is nothing SAFe specific here. The scaled estimation problem is the same.

There are two basic ways that you can scale these estimates:

  • Pure Feature and Epic points which are used as estimate: With this approach you use a similar process that you would use with story points. In other words you would do a team based relative size estimate to generate “feature points” or “epic points”. You might choose to define a new scale so that it is clear you are talking about feature points or epics points. For example, feature points might be 10X a story point, with a sequence that looks like 10, 20, 30, 50, etc. In the same way that you track team velocity to determine how much you can get done, you can track closure of features and epics to reflect how much you can get done in these scaled environments. In many ways, this approach is a "fractal" of the story point approach and benefits in a similar way. The main downside of this approach is that it will take time to get useful (in terms of forecasting) data. Just like a team has to wait an iteration (a couple of weeks) to get their first data point, features will take a quarter to get their first real data point and epics will probably take longer still.
  • Summated Story points to create Feature and Epic estimates:

Note: 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”).

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