General Agile Estimation Approach

Project managers often grapple with unforeseen challenges, complicating the estimation of time and budget for prioritized backlog tasks. Navigating uncertainties demands the adept use of Agile estimation techniques, allowing precise calculations and timely deliveries. Acknowledging potential deviations from plans, successful project management requires a nuanced approach to handle unpredictabilities effectively.

What is Agile Estimation?

Agile estimation involves assessing the effort required for a prioritized task in the product backlog. Typically gauged in terms of time, these estimates play a crucial role in precise sprint planning.

1. Story points, a numerical measure, further aid in evaluating the complexity of achieving success with a user story, enhancing the accuracy of Agile estimates.
2. While accurate effort estimation is crucial, it’s essential to allow for unforeseen impediments. Striving for perfect accuracy may prove challenging due to evolving requirements, Agile anti-patterns, and other unpredictable factors in development.

Why Run Agile Estimations?

Agile estimates are most important and it is very essential for the:

1. For making teams accountable for the way to deliver tasks.
2. Across the Agile team with introducing the discipline,
3. For the prediction of the time approximately, it will take to finish a project,
4. Help to enable better sprint management,
5. To improve team productivity.

Principles of Agile Estimation

Some of the useful basic principles of Agile estimation techniques are as follows:

1. Collaborative Estimation Strategies: Encouraging collaboration within the Agile development team is a best practice for accurate estimates. Involving everyone prevents the blame game associated with incorrect estimates, fostering a collective and accountable approach.
2. Efficient Agile Estimation: Agile estimation prioritizes speed over traditional methods, avoiding attempts to predict the future. Recognizing estimation as non-value-added, it seeks to minimize this activity for enhanced efficiency.
3. Relative Unit Estimation: Estimation uses relative units like “points” or qualitative labels, not dollars or days. This approach facilitates task estimation and comparison.

Challenges In the Estimation of Agile Projects

There are the following challenges in the estimation of the Agile project are given below:

1. Traditional Bottom-Up Project Planning: Traditional project management employs a bottom-up approach, where individuals or teams invest upfront time in scheduling, task planning, and deliverable formulation. This method involves breaking down each aspect, estimating costs and hours from the end, and emphasizing meticulous planning and comprehensive understanding to ensure project success.
2. Effective Project Management: After sorting priorities, a project manager focuses on ensuring teams adhere to set deadlines and allocated hours for each deliverable. Dedicating quality time, the manager navigates challenges, fosters collaboration, and maintains a vigilant eye on project progress, contributing to successful outcomes through effective time management and deadline adherence.
3. Dynamic Estimation in Agile Project Management: Agile project management takes a contrasting approach, employing gross-level estimation. Starting with broad estimates for project components, it progressively refines details as more information surfaces. This approach, although effective, can pose challenges without sufficient practice, requiring teams to adapt to the dynamic nature of Agile estimation throughout the project lifecycle.

Stages of Agile Estimation: (The Shortest Discovery Phase)

At the project’s inception, with a limited horizon, a brief product discovery phase proves prudent. This phase, fundamental to Agile development, dissects requirements into manageable batch sizes, typically spanning two to four weeks, contingent on project complexity. This strategic exercise lays a robust foundation for the ensuing development journey.

Stages of Agile Estimation

1. Conduct Stakeholder Interviews

The Business Analyst (BA) in the discovery team reviews shared documentation, identifying gaps and queries. Through regular workshops with stakeholders, the BA addresses gaps and clarifies system workflow doubts.

Based on these workshops, the BA comes with all the business and functional requirements:

• Business Requirements Document (BRD): It helps to define the end goal of the project.
• Functional Requirements Document (FRD): It helps to describe the features that are required to achieve the end goal.

2. Define High-Level Product Backlog

• In Agile Estimation, the Business Analyst and Technical Architect collaborate to define stakeholders’ desired outcomes, crafting a feasible solution or product to guide the project forward.
• The product backlog, outlined with epics and story titles, encapsulates the fundamental aspects of the application. Subsequently, a validation process ensures alignment with the project’s scope, catering to the client’s requirements and expectations.

3. Understand the Client and its Potential Customers

• Tailoring to problem complexity, the discovery phase enlists a UX design anchor alongside the BA. The UX analyst’s key task involves comprehending the client and potential customer needs, ensuring a user-centric approach throughout the project’s conceptualization.
• The UX analyst crafts personas for potential users, delving into their application interaction within the ecosystem. Deliverables encompass ecosystem maps, personas, user journeys, and storyboards, crucial components ensuring a user-centered design approach.

4. Prioritize Requirements

• Post-stakeholder validation, the discovery team engages in Agile cost estimation, focusing on the high-level backlog to refine project insights.
• In developing the Agile model, analysis and prioritization determine the order of completing requirements. Employing the MoSCoW method, backlog items are classified into must-haves, should-haves, could-haves, and won’t-haves, strategically shaping project priorities.

5. Preparation of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Backlog

• Following prioritization, the Business Analyst compiles ‘must-haves’ into the backlog, earmarking them for MVP Development. Select ‘should-haves’ may also be included, ensuring the product maintains competitiveness in the market, emphasizing strategic planning and market relevance.

6. Estimation of the Cost and Timeline of the Project

• The discovery team evaluates the MVP backlog, outlining estimated costs and timelines for the first release. Through iterative cycles of building, refining, and reassessing, they tailor the estimate to meet evolving business needs, allowing flexibility in feature adjustments during product development.

Advantages of Agile Estimation

There are following advantages of using the Agile estimation Approach are as follows:

1. Adaptability and Adaptivity: An Agile approach suits moderately uncertain environments where precisely defining the problem and planning the solution upfront is challenging. Flexibility and adaptability become crucial to refine requirements and evolve the solution dynamically throughout the project.
2. Imagination and Innovation: In today’s fiercely competitive environment, ordinary products don’t appeal. The Agile estimation approach prioritizes creativity and innovation to enhance the business value of solutions. Balancing planning and control is key, to fostering a climate that encourages creativity and innovation.
3. Time-to-Market: Agile estimation yields quicker time-to-market with shorter startup times. Continuous improvement enables early delivery of at least part of the solution, eliminating the necessity to complete the entire task.
4. Lower Costs: Adopting an Agile estimation approach can substantially reduce project expenses. This results from minimizing unnecessary documentation and control requirements, boosting the project team’s efficiency, and mitigating feature bloat through incremental development focus.

Disadvantages of Agile Estimation

Here are some of the few essential points created the hindrances of the Agile estimation approach:

1. Preparing and Skill Required: Executing an effective Agile approach demands a concise and well-planned estimation technique. Some teams overlook the necessity for training and expertise, attempting Agile without grasping its principles, which is practically unfeasible.
2. Hierarchical Transformation: Successful implementation of an Agile approach may necessitate organizational changes. Building trust and collaboration between business clients and the development team may involve overcoming existing organizational barriers.
3. Adaptability: Scaling Agile for large projects can be challenging. Models like Scrum-of-Scrums, LeSS, and SAFe exist, but none offer simple, ready-made solutions.

Conclusion

As a Final overview, it is concluded that the Agile estimation holds paramount significance for businesses. Contextualizing the estimation approach within a project is crucial, especially for those with uncertain and challenging requirements. In such cases, a proficient team equipped with comprehensive knowledge of estimation techniques and tools becomes indispensable. This article provides a holistic solution, addressing key aspects of agile estimation and planning.