User story estimation

Recently, I was approached by an Agile tester. He had a dispute with his team about how they should do their estimations. “When we started to assign story points to the user stories, it came to light that not everyone thought the same way about how to estimate these points,” he explained in his email. “Some developers excluded the test work and made an estimation for the development work only, while others included writing the test automation scripts and ignored the manual testing. Can you share your view so I can benchmark my ideas and address the issue with my team?”

The planning and estimation done in Scrum teams is no rocket science. Try to stay away from complex calculations. Rather than providing estimates with multiple decimals that give a false feeling of accuracy, create a lightweight process that enables teams to determine what to focus on and give a forecast on when they’ll work on and complete certain user stories.