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Comparing Estimation Techniques

Which Estimation Units Should Your Teams Use For Work Items? 

Why estimate in the first place?

At the feature level, you want estimates so you can figure ROI (Return On Investment), so the business and product owners can prioritize one feature against another
At the roadmap & backlog level, most organizations want to be able to forecast, be it at the feature level or release level, so you need to be able to understand what is your organization’s capacity, and translate it into plans with dates and deliverables, milestones etc.
At the finer-grained, work-item level (typically User Story),  you want to help teams understand their capacity so they can take on the right amount. In particular in teams that use a frequent planning cadence, such as that prescribed by Scrum
Still at the team level, team members setting expectations on the amount of work they plan to complete can surprise themselves, learn, and improve.
At the team level, you want to understand whether a work item is small enough, might want teams to discuss estimates as part of creating a common understanding about work and align their views

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5 pitfalls when using Atlassian Jira

Jira Atlassian is a great ALM tool for managing your Agile environment. It provides a friendly work space for Agile teams and has some informative out-of-the-box reports that allow teams to easily apply root cause analysis.

At the program level, there are several easy ways to achieve aggregated data reports and epic progress boards. The relatively new Jira portfolio also has some interesting features that enable larger organizations to manage their program, including shared planning, shared releases, progress, and mitigation plans.

Visiting many organizations that use Jira as their main tool for their Agile environment, I decided to summarize 5 common pitfalls it is best to avoid.

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If they self-organize, what is our role as team leads?

“If they self-organize, what is our role as team leads?”

This is one tough question my managers asked me when I proposed we give eXtreme Programming a try. At the time, this question made me feel very uneasy, and I had a hard time providing some good answers. 15 years later, I think I finally have finally come to terms with the tough issue of management and self-organization.

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