Cfrgtkky

We are team of 3 Back-end developers, 3 Ios developers, 1 QA, 1 Product Owner and 1 SM, working on a Social App. We are interested to do this using the agile methodology with the Scrum framework. We are new to agile/Scrum and are having some difficulty implementing them. We are in Sprint 0 and already wrote user stories and wanted to estimate them.

We have the following questions:

• Who should be included in the estimation process other than developers?




• How can ios developers estimate the effort of back-end developers?
  Same goes for Designers and QA.




• If everyone will estimate his/her own effort then how can the SM get a single story point estimate?

Who:

Estimation in Scrum is done by the whole "development team". Scrum says that this is a cross-functional group "with all the skills as a team necessary to create a product Increment". So this would include developers, QA, designers, etc. This would not include non-contributing managers (contributing managers is a whole other conversation), product owner, scrum master, etc.

How:

There are a lot of different techniques. One of the most common is that everyone shares their estimate at once (often written on cards that are revealed simultaneously) each person's estimate should be based off of their understanding of all the work, including that which may not rest in their area of expertise. Once everyone has shown their estimate, the team can discuss different points of view on the size of the work. This can raise challenges or opportunities that some team members may not have considered. This can be difficult at first, especially if team members have never considered the context of others before, but it gets much easier with practice. What most teams find is that you don't have to be able to do someone else's work to be able to consider how work will impact then and that level of understanding comes fairly fast.

Who should be included in the estimation process other than developers?

Both anyone involved in getting that story Done (likely including QA), as their effort is part of the estimation. And the Product Owner, who may reprioritize stories based on their estimates.

How can ios developers estimate the effort of back-end developers? Same goes for Designers and QA.

I believe this has already been answered on pmse. My suggested approach would be to foster knowledge-sharing so that your developers can become T-shaped.

If everyone will estimate his/her own effort then how can the SM get a single story point estimate?

Look into Planning Poker. Everyone estimates, and if a discrepancy is found, the story is discussed then the estimate repeated until consensus is reached.

The story points need to be estimated by each and every member of the Scrum Team and then they must collectively come to a conclusion on the most likely number of story points.

However, the developers who say the max and min story point estimates can explain what they view the complexity of the story to be, and why.