Task estimation tricks
When you get start agile and scrum, you'll soon make tasks and user stories estimations. That's difficult: how can you estimate the amount of time you need to release a single and small functionality? For me it's matter of practice because we are using scrum as an inspect and adapt framework to work with method, discipline, rules and constantly improve ourself. We want to be professional so let every effort we do be productive for our corporate and make customers and ourself happy!
- Find time waste when and where you are in trouble
- If you think you'll have impediments try to anticipate them. Don't underrate details, they can be an impediment!
- Provide more time to do job. Take your time to do tests and improve the quality of the software
- Estimate the confidence during the daily scrum, if you are not ready to do a task try to ask help or choose another task on the board. That's will help you to be more operative during the day
Don't underrate anything, any single detail can slow you down and it can create impendiments if you don't estimate it and tell to yourself and to the other team member about your difficulties. Yes, you can change your decisions but you must fail fast and restart every practical or mental process to proceed in the right way. As you can see practicing Scrum, it's only a matter of practice and the scrum framework itself will help you to improve after each iteration. Check out story points numbers and the total hour sum estimated for each user stories. The count must be corrispondent. No than a half day for 1 point. 3 story point for 1 day work (8 hours), and 5 points for more than 1 day. Split user stories you estimate more than 5 points, it could be almost always possible. Or at least isolate problems for a complex user stories and create new stories to face the problems. The solution to all problems is practice and watch your step to improve. Log work hours with a defect tracker tool (Jira or New Relic). Use the retrospective to underline all errors and the point where you can improve.