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I got around this, specially around 'planning poker' when I got to be lead in these scenarios that forced you to do it. Whenever there is a discussing on how lo

I got around this, specially around 'planning poker' when I got to be lead in these scenarios that forced you to do it. Whenever there is a discussing on how long something should take, whoever says the least amount, is tasked with the job. After 1-2 of these meetings, amazingly, all estimates started to come back quite higher than before. I still believe that whoever takes the task, should be the one deciding how long it will take, and only after understanding the scope of the work. Planning poker is the most useless piece of shit I ever seen, and still, it is used all around by idiots. If I am asked to estimate something, I will always give the highest possible value and justify with "I don't know enough about it to estimate". If I am managing and I have a top down force pushing for this, I will always make sure that the stupid process is obvious how fucking broken it is.

Viliam1234 5y ago
The original idea was that "planning poker" should estimate the tasks in "story points", which are absolutely NOT supposed to correspond to days. It is just a way of saying "it seems like the task X will require twice as much work as task Y". Some teams do not use numbers at all, and estimate stories in "t-shirt sizes": S, M, L, XL, XXL. But of course, most companies want to have their Scrum and micromanage it too. So they estimate in days, and call them "story points". Or sometimes they don't even bother to pretend, and estimate directly in days. (So, how can you estimate how much gets done during the sprint, when all you have is the "story points"? You keep the records from previous sprints, and see how many "story points" got done back then. Adjust the number if someone takes a vacation, etc. This is self-correcting in long term: if someone starts pushing developers to estimate low story points, you will see that fewer story points get done per sprint, so your estimates of how much work gets done will remain correct.)

Viliam1234 5y ago

The original idea was that "planning poker" should estimate the tasks in "story points", which are absolutely NOT supposed to correspond to days. It is just a way of saying "it seems like the task X will require twice as much work as task Y". Some teams do not use numbers at all, and estimate stories in "t-shirt sizes": S, M, L, XL, XXL. But of course, most companies want to have their Scrum and micromanage it too. So they estimate in days, and call them "story points". Or sometimes they don't even bother to pretend, and estimate directly in days. (So, how can you estimate how much gets done during the sprint, when all you have is the "story points"? You keep the records from previous sprints, and see how many "story points" got done back then. Adjust the number if someone takes a vacation, etc. This is self-correcting in long term: if someone starts pushing developers to estimate low story points, you will see that fewer story points get done per sprint, so your estimates of how much work gets done will remain correct.)