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agilescrumestimation

Who make estimations on Agile for Developement tasks?


We are supposed to follow agile approach in my team.We have a Scrum master, Product owner, proxy product owner and team of devs, I am a dev.

During Poker, we need to make estimations on developpement tasks. From what I know about Agile, only devs can give estimations, in our case, Scrum master and Product owner want us to follow their estimations (they have some pression with clients) so when we estimate a task to 5 days, they do not like it, even if we have explainations why 5. And in general (99% of time) they ask re-estimation and kind of "force" us to change our estimation to 2.

The worst part is that they even do not know what they are talking about, sometimes we even have half of specifications !

My question is : According to Agile, is it true that Dev tasks estimation are done only by devs, right ?


Solution

  • You are right. The scrum master's role is there to facilitate the meeting, not take part in the meeting by estimating. You are correct. Estimation is only done by the dev team.

    Instead of arguing with agile principles I would do a more constructive way to approach this by writing down two estimates: the dev team's estimation and the other estimation by the scrum master and product owner and when the ticket is done look at how much time it actually took. There can be learnings in there for the dev team as well, but much more learning for your scrum master and the product owner.

    Sounds like a lot of pressure.