Shawn, Stop Estimating Effort in Days

Shawn Tabor wants to know whether to estimate project effort in days or story points. Aren't they the same thing?

I've used four ways of estimating effort in my Dynamics 365 projects:

Counting cardsDaysT-shirtsStory points

Estimating in days is an absolute estimation method, whereas t-shirts and story points are both relative estimation methods. This means that we compare the relative size of items using a scale, rather than trying to estimate the absolute size.

Story point estimation has several benefits:

It's not as critical to know exactly what types of work are included in the estimateStory points encourage me to estimate how long it'll take the team to get the story done, not just me or my partStory point estimates don't need to be re-estimated if our velocity changes if we change our definition of done or our team compositionHumans are better at relative estimation, which Neil tries to illustrate with the land area of countries.

Shawn, stop estimating Microsoft Business Applications projects in days and start using story points!

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