Agile: Estimation, Metrics & Common Pitfalls

Estimation Techniques

• Story Points: relative measure of effort/complexity — not hours. Fibonacci scale (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13) reflects uncertainty growth.

• Planning Poker: each team member secretly picks a card; reveal simultaneously; discuss outliers; re-estimate until consensus.

• T-Shirt Sizes: XS, S, M, L, XL — quick relative sizing without false precision.

• Three-Point Estimation: (Optimistic + 4×Most Likely + Pessimistic) / 6 — good for time estimates when needed.

• #NoEstimates: count stories instead of estimating. Works when stories are consistently small.

• Affinity Mapping: silently group user stories by size on a wall — fast for large backlogs.

Key Agile Metrics

Velocity        — story points completed per sprint. Use for sprint planning, not comparison between teams.
                  Track trend, not single sprint. Expect variation of ±20%.

Burn-down chart — remaining work (points or tasks) over sprint days. Should trend toward zero.
                  Flat line = blocked. Sudden drop = scope reduction.

Burn-up chart   — completed work + total scope over time. Shows scope changes explicitly.

Lead Time       — request to delivery. Indicates responsiveness to customers.
Cycle Time      — start of work to delivery. Indicates team throughput.

Throughput      — stories/features completed per week. More reliable than velocity.

NPS             — Net Promoter Score from customers. Outcome metric, not output.

Escaped defects — bugs found in production. Quality indicator.
                  High escaped defects → improve DoD, testing, review process.

Retrospective Formats

• Start / Stop / Continue: what should we start doing, stop doing, keep doing?

• 4Ls: Liked, Learned, Lacked, Longed For — structured reflection

• Mad / Sad / Glad: emotional temperature check — surfaces team morale issues

• Sailboat: wind (helps), anchors (slows), rocks (risks), sun (goals) — visual metaphor

• Timeline Retro: plot events on a timeline; rate team mood per event — for longer retrospectives

• Key rule: one actionable improvement item per retro. Many retros produce long lists that are never acted on.

Common Agile Anti-Patterns

• Wagile / Scrumfall: Scrum ceremonies applied to Waterfall planning. Sprints exist but requirements are frozen. No real iteration.

• Fake Product Owner: PO is a proxy with no authority to make decisions. All decisions escalate. Bottleneck.

• Sprint as mini-Waterfall: days 1-3 design, days 4-7 code, days 8-10 test. Testing compressed, quality suffers.

• Velocity as a management target: "this sprint we must hit velocity 40." Teams pad estimates; velocity becomes meaningless.

• No Definition of Done: "done" means different things to different people. Technical debt accumulates.

• Skipping Retrospectives: "we're too busy to improve our process." Teams never inspect or adapt.

• Ignoring technical debt: feature pressure suppresses refactoring. Velocity declines over time. The system becomes harder to change.

• Hero culture: one person owns critical knowledge. Bus factor of 1. Blocks collective code ownership.