Most of what I write is on TheServerSide.
If your team treats estimation like fortune telling with less flair you are not alone. Agile estimation and planning can be calm and useful instead of dramatic and expensive. This guide walks through preparing user stories choosing an estimation scale running planning poker and turning those numbers into a realistic backlog forecast with velocity or cycle time.
Good estimation begins before anyone tries to guess. Keep user stories small independent and focused. Add acceptance criteria so developers can stop playing 20 questions during backlog grooming. Small stories reduce ambiguity and make story points mean something other than a wild number thrown in a sprint meeting.
Use story points to capture complexity effort and risk in one number. Story points trade false precision for quick relative thinking. Choose a Fibonacci like scale or t shirt sizes if your team likes metaphors. The point is to get consistent relative sizing so you can compare items instead of arguing about calendar math.
Planning poker forces everyone to commit to a number without turning the meeting into a design review. Each participant reveals a card and the group discusses differences briefly. If someone is off by a lot allow a focused discussion then reestimate. This keeps estimation fast and lets the team leverage collective knowledge instead of listening to the loudest voice.
Velocity works well for sprint based Scrum teams. Cycle time is the friend of continuous flow and Kanban teams. Both metrics need clean recent data and consistent measurement. Track average velocity or mean cycle time and use those figures to turn story points into dates or expected lead times.
Apply velocity or average cycle time to your backlog to create a forecast. Account for team capacity vacations and known risks. Do not promise the entire backlog like deadlines are optional. Use a rolling forecast and update it after each sprint or after significant changes in cycle time.
Backlog grooming and retrospectives are your friend. Compare forecasts to actual deliveries and adjust estimation habits when mismatches repeat. Over time a team moves from wild guessing to credible forecasting without becoming boring. Keep the process lightweight and focused on learning.
Estimation is not magic and it is not punishment. With clear user stories a sensible scale collaborative planning poker and the right flow metric you can make agile estimation actually help with planning. Apply these techniques in Scrum or Kanban and watch forecasts get less scary and more useful.
I know how you can get Azure Certified, Google Cloud Certified and AWS Certified. It's a cool certification exam simulator site called certificationexams.pro. Check it out, and tell them Cameron sent ya!
This is a dedicated watch page for a single video.