2 Reasons to estimate new tasks during the sprint

You may have experienced some product owners adding lots of new features, bug fixes or sometimes support cases to ongoing sprints. As the team has to promptly work on those new tasks, they might have to drop some of planned tasks from the sprint. It is quite OK if your PO is accepting you to drop planned tasks. But practically what happens is PO forgets that it happened because the team had to work on the newly added tasks. At this point team get two advantages of estimating new tasks.

1. Visibility

Without showing that the team had to spend some extra amount of time for new tasks, how your stakeholders can visible it? Therefore you have to estimate the time for new tasks and show the stakeholders that this much of time we spent on new tasks.

2. Calculate Buffer

Since every time a team gets lots of new tasks you might try to keep a buffer to handle interruptions. But do you know how many hours you have to keep as a buffer? To know this again, you have to monitor the time spent on new tasks for 2 to 3 sprints and get the average time.

Simple little steps can help you to run your sprint smoothly. Be Agile !!!