When Is the Best Time to Estimate Story Points?

Last series When Is the Worst Time to Estimate Story Points?, we discussed about the worst possible time to estimate our product backlog items.

This week, the thoughts on when the best time is for estimating product backlog items will be shared.

However, it’s not the preferred approach.

Estimating product backlog items immediately following a daily scrum, usually two or three days before the end of the sprint, is preferred. There are a few advantages to this:

• It’s late enough in the sprint that there hopefully will not be many new product backlog items thought of that sprint
• It’s not so late, though, that the product owner does not have time to act on the new information provided by the estimates
• The whole team is present, and everyone is already interrupted and available

Estimating product backlog items (usually with Planning Poker) immediately after a daily scrum is preferred over estimating during a product backlog refinement meeting because the entire team isn’t generally recommended to participate in refinement meetings.

On most teams, requiring the participation of the entire team in backlog refinement meetings is unnecessary. These meetings can be thought of as pre-planning checkpoints to ensure that the product owner has a sufficient understanding of the items at the top of the product backlog.

This comes from meeting participants asking the product owner questions and ensuring no dark corners remain in the highest priority items.

While more team members in these meetings can lead to more comprehensive questions, a sweet spot can often be found with about half of the team participating. This achieves a good balance in keeping meeting time down while still raising most issues during grooming.

If you, however, prefer to have the entire team participate in refinement meetings and choose to estimate product backlog items then, by all means, continue to do so.

Either approach will help your team succeed with agile,