T-Shirt Estimates

Posted on January 21st, 2010 by Jeff

I found this post on estimating user stories via the Stack Overflow podcast. Since my only experience with Agile/Scrum estimating was with planning poker, I found this an interesting approach. T-Shirt estimating is a great way to get a  feel for the size of  a user story (a task); the team estimates how long a story will take by saying “This task is an XL”, or “This one’s a small”. The sizes correspond with how long that team member thinks it would take to complete that task.  You don’t need long drawn out discussions here — the idea is to get a quick feel for the size of the task in order to do your planning. Planning Poker, on the other hand, is a more granular methodology, requiring more discussion and thought.

By having less values to use for the estimates — T Shirt estimating uses 5 sizes, Planning Poker uses up to 10 — allows for faster consensus building among the team. Once the stories have been selected  for the next sprint using T Shirt estimating, more precise estimation using Planning poker can be done if desired.

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