5 ms·

Ask HN: Is there academic research on the effectiveness of estimation in scrum?

5 points by fjahr 9y ago

It would be especially interesting to see results about improvement of accuracy over time.

shubb 9y ago
There is very little accademic research on Scrum. This person has done some stuff on some aspects: https://collaboration.csc.ncsu.edu/laurie/publicationsAll.html#Agile https://collaboration.csc.ncsu.edu/laurie/publicationsAll.ht...
UK-AL 9y ago
It's generally hard to do academic research on these sorts of things. Since you need multiple teams, building similar software in order to compare.
blcArmadillo 9y ago
Not specific to scrum but I am reminded of a part from Peopleware: "The most surprising part of the 1985 Jeffery-Lawrence study appeared at the very end, when they investigated the productivity of 24 projects for which no estimates were prepared at all. These projects far outperformed all the others (see Table 5-3)." Table 5-3 Productivity by Estimation Approach (Full Result) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Effort Estimate Prepared by Average Productivity Number of Projects ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Programmer alone 8.0 19 Supervisor alone 6.6 23 Promgrammer & supervisor 7.8 16 System analyst 9.5 21 (no estimate) 12.0 24 Source: https://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-Second/dp/0932633439 https://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-...
- usgroup 9y ago
  This doesn't surprise me tbh. It's the same situation except you're not shackled by yesterday's commitments and free to act independently of them .
AnimalMuppet 9y ago
Not scrum-specific, and I don't recall whether it was backed by academic research, but one of the rules in XP is that estimates longer than 3 weeks were (more) unreliable. So if the estimate was longer than 3 weeks, you had to break it up into chunks, each of which was 3 weeks or smaller.
elviejo 9y ago
There is no correlation between time duration and task estimation. https://www.iancarroll.com/2016/04/18/no-correlation-between-estimated-size-and-actual-time-taken/ https://www.iancarroll.com/2016/04/18/no-correlation-between...

5 points by fjahr 9y ago

It would be especially interesting to see results about improvement of accuracy over time.

There is very little accademic research on Scrum. This person has done some stuff on some aspects: https://collaboration.csc.ncsu.edu/laurie/publicationsAll.html#Agile https://collaboration.csc.ncsu.edu/laurie/publicationsAll.ht...

UK-AL 9y ago

It's generally hard to do academic research on these sorts of things. Since you need multiple teams, building similar software in order to compare.

blcArmadillo 9y ago

Not specific to scrum but I am reminded of a part from Peopleware: "The most surprising part of the 1985 Jeffery-Lawrence study appeared at the very end, when they investigated the productivity of 24 projects for which no estimates were prepared at all. These projects far outperformed all the others (see Table 5-3)." Table 5-3 Productivity by Estimation Approach (Full Result) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Effort Estimate Prepared by Average Productivity Number of Projects ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Programmer alone 8.0 19 Supervisor alone 6.6 23 Promgrammer & supervisor 7.8 16 System analyst 9.5 21 (no estimate) 12.0 24 Source: https://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-Second/dp/0932633439 https://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-...

usgroup 9y ago
This doesn't surprise me tbh. It's the same situation except you're not shackled by yesterday's commitments and free to act independently of them .

AnimalMuppet 9y ago

Not scrum-specific, and I don't recall whether it was backed by academic research, but one of the rules in XP is that estimates longer than 3 weeks were (more) unreliable. So if the estimate was longer than 3 weeks, you had to break it up into chunks, each of which was 3 weeks or smaller.

elviejo 9y ago

There is no correlation between time duration and task estimation. https://www.iancarroll.com/2016/04/18/no-correlation-between-estimated-size-and-actual-time-taken/ https://www.iancarroll.com/2016/04/18/no-correlation-between...