Why You Should Double Your Time Estimates on Agile Teams

Whether or not your Agile team has dedicated product managers, software engineers usually estimate how long each individual work item or “ticket” will take, such as using story pointing. Here’s why you should *double* your time estimates.

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Agile software development teams use a variety of strategies to manage workload and estimate when key features and bugfixes will be delivered.

Some teams prefer “story pointing,” where each work item is given either an estimate of hours required or a rough estimate of workload.

Other teams use “t-shirt sizes” to quickly label tasks or projects by their estimated effort level.

And other teams eschew time estimates completely, just asking the coders or the product team as a whole when they expect to be done.

Whichever strategy you use, here’s why you should double your time estimates — and it’s not so that everyone starts working at half the speed.

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