How to get better in estimates
Hi.
Just came to a new scrum team and notices that burn down graph in TFS always goes upwards at the beging of the sprint before it starts to burn down. I asked why and the reason - the new tasks are added at the begining even after the planning finished.It is reoccurring scenario for over many sprints and the team is used to this now.
How can we improve the situation?
Shall we spend more time planning identifying all the task in the beginning , or is this normal for the team to add more tasks as sprint progress.?
What do you recommend.?
Regards
My 2 cents...
In and of itself, adding tasks after planning is not an issue - and is a common occurrence. It may or may not be indicative of other issues- that depends on the particulars, of course.
In planning a team may diligently attempt to identify the work/tasks involved to deliver the PBI/story. Despite that best effort, actually getting into the work very often exposes what was unknown at the time of planning and tasks are altered/added/removed as necessary. I think that can be classified as 'normal' (and healthy).
On the other end of the spectrum, if the team is adding tasks because they brushed planning aside to begin with, that's something to address.
What is your goal here Roman?
have you asked the team how this affects them?
Is the way they are currently doing things working for everybody? Is the current way slowing them down? Is there a better way for them to work?
I've come to learn that sometimes I (as Scrum Master) think a problem exists, when in fact it does not exist and is bothering no one on the team nor is it slowing them down.
Sprint Planning doesn't have to be done in terms of tasks - that's just a common convention. What matters is that, by the end of the session, the team have a plan which is sufficiently detailed and robust for them to explain how they intend to create the increment. I
f they can't explain that to the satisfaction of the Product Owner then Sprint Planning has been inadequate.
The Sprint Plan is however expected to evolve during the Sprint, as a result of collaboration and the further clarification of requirements. As such, some of the constituent items (e.g. tasks) may be added or removed.
In my opinion, i think the first thing you should do here is to check if this always happen. If yes, then you should review with the team why this is happeneing.
This can really be an indicator that the sprint planning was not done properly. I mean i understand that it might happen that sometimes the estimation will be readjusted, but not always at the beginning of the sprint. If the dev. team starts with the sprint without a proper estimation, then they are somehow increasing the risk of not delivering all the selected PBIs.
In addition to the sprint planning, you could check how far your dev. team is allocating time to the backlog refinement (grooming) during the sprint.