Estimating User Stories for Developers – Part 2

The product owner role is responsible for prioritizing the user stories.  This prioritization gives developers notice of what they will be working on next. Through extensive research is wasteful this early in the development process, it does give developers a high-level overview. This gives them a better understanding of how and where each small piece will fit together and provide consideration for other development tasks.

Estimation

Once user stories have been approved and prioritized, they must be estimated. Where traditional development uses hour estimates, Agile development uses story points. These story points do not translate directly to time but give a general idea of effort. They are relative and indicate which user stories require more or less work than others.

Within the estimation phase, developers are valuable because they know their own abilities and limitations. They know what they can accomplish and whether user stories are small enough to be taken care of within a sprint. One of the key elements of Agile is that new features are delivered at the end of each sprint. If a user story isn’t finished by the end of the sprint, stakeholders are given one less new feature that they expected.

Commitment

The final phase of user stories is commitment. With a fully fleshed out and estimated user story, they are then committed to a sprint. While this does not guarantee that a user story will be completed within the sprint, it does mean that the development team believes they can finish it.

Developers have given most of their expertise in earlier phases of user story creation. For commitment, they simply commit to what they will be working on in a sprint. They can then begin the development of the features.

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