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Ideal Hours vs. Story Points for Agile Estimates

There is a never ending battle between those who insist on estimating in story points and business people who say "how many man hours will that be?"

I have also never been involved in an Agile project that does any validating of how accurate the prior estimates were. But Ideal Days could easily be validated by the business.

I am considering Ideal Hours. Day are too large, ideal or not.

How about Ideal Fibonacci Hours?

I'd like to hear what things others have tried, but an leaning away from points...

Thanks.

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Jessica Riga

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curiouswebster

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Fibonacci "Ideal" Hours.

I think this would bridge the gap between developers and the business, which needs to always resolve to headcount.

I suppose, a solution to estimate vary large tasks is to break it up into smaller tasks, for example 13 or 20 points being the max.

I even consider making distinct tasks for testing and developing, in some cases. Each of the two tasks would be handled by different developers. I think this would encourage pair programming as needed, and make the tester more objective than developers can sometimes be with their own code.

I read criticisms of Ideal Days versus the abstraction of Story Points. But personally, I have never been on a project that tried to validate the accuracy of the Story Point estimates. While a Fibonacci Ideal Hours method, the comparison would be easy and implicit.

Thoughts?

curiouswebster

ASKER

thanks