> I think an engineer needs freedom to be able to exercise judgement say "I don't understand this task well enough to estimate it yet." Absolutely. This is its

> I think an engineer needs freedom to be able to exercise judgement say "I don't understand this task well enough to estimate it yet." Absolutely. This is itself a valuable estimate. Very occasionally engineers will give a very high points value to indicate that the proposed story is simply too complex as written and needs to be decomposed further. > Establishing this freedom is hard: It absolutely is. Everything we do at Pivotal that works well is actually hard. Our cheat code for bootstrapping these practices is that we already bootstrapped them years ago. But maintaining a culture is harder than building one, which is a trillion times harder than improving one.