New App: Make The Estimation Process Simpler And More Inclusive



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Dear Miro Team,

I suggest to rethink the necessity for an estimation feature. For a couple of years now there is an ever-growing share among “leading” agile coaches and developers who argue against estimates that surely you also have come across. Let’s mention Kent Beck, Ron Jeffries, Allan Holub, Tom Ottinger, Alistair Cockburn, J.B. Rainsberger, Vasco Duarte, etc. to name just a few.

 

Estimates aren’t necessary for being agile and they don’t contribute to become more agile. What I have observed so far is that whenever teams estimated their work these estimates sooner or later leaked to management and were there taken at face value - with all the subsequent hassle one would expect. This is harmful to teams.

Jira has been offering estimates for years and recently - giving in to pure ridiculousness - also introduced decimals for estimates. As if estimates are some sort of scientific measure. They are not. Virtually all other task management tools do the same. But Jira and many colleagues are not a tool well suited for agile teams. Full disclaimer: I once was also strongly in favor of estimates and even took video courses from Mike Cohn on how to improve estimates. Improving estimates is not valuable work. Estimating is not valuable work either.

The “inventor” of Story Points, Ron Jeffries, is even slighty sorry for inventing them given how points are being misunderstood and misused in modern SW development: https://ronjeffries.com/articles/019-01ff/story-points/Index.html- geometry dash

 

Miro has been my favorite tool for workshops over the last four years or so and introducing estimation will not change that. Yet I would advocate to NOT become another task management tool.

Thanks!

Hello,

why is it not possible to change the estimate scale? we use 0.5 as well and sometimes we would like to estimate with Tshirt sizes. Am I missing something? 

 

 

Userlevel 4

Hey @Lorenzo we don’t offer the ability to change the estimation scale today (Fibonacci and t-shirt are the only ones) but I will share feedback with the product team. Thank you!

Hi Jennifer
thanks, good idea! Would like to add Azure DEVOPs sync, additionally to Jira to your roadmap.

Expectation easy sync between DEVOPS and Miro: I can drop some PBIs to Miro, do the estimation and best case the estimation appears in DEVOPS. Do not know, if this is possible at all, but that would be my usecase...

Best regards

Reimar

thank you @Shubangi Sunder, but I'm also not able to switch between Fibonacci and Tshirts, the estimation popup is grayed out. How do you switch to TShitrs?

 

Also, yes it would be nice to at least be able to add a 0.5, which is quite common in multiple scrum teams.

Can it count the total votes? (sum of votes on all cards / all cards in a region). This is an absolute necessity for me. Otherwise, we’ll continue to use Excel or Jira for this...

Custom estimates please! Silly to try to force Fibonacci on everyone. Please allow estimation pre-sets to be configurable by board, or configurable at estimation time by voters. 

Userlevel 4

@Jasmine Friedrich that would be an interesting update to the Kanban function in MIRO if it was able to total based on SP.

thank you, looking forward on these small improvements so we can stop using jira and having to share screen for refinement :)

 

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