I encounter scrum teams changing, or worse, creating, story estimates during their sprint planning meeting. This slows down the meeting and it undermines the whole purpose of estimation: predictability.
Predictability is knowing what the business will get and when. Stakeholders might ask the team: “Can we get these features by the end of the year?” Or: “When will the new feature set be ready?”
In a sprint planning meeting, the only predictability needed is a simple yes or no. Is the story (product backlog item) in the sprint? If it’s in, then the stakeholders can expect to get it by the end of the sprint.
The purpose of estimates is to support longer-term predictability, meaning when are we going to get stories from the product backlog? This leads to the reason why we should not change estimates in sprint planning.
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