Automatic estimates
In Betterplan you don't have to estimate every Story. Every User Story without an estimate of its own automatically gets a provisional value, which scope, forecast, Timeline and cost use right away. Your Backlog is "estimated" from day one, without anyone spending time on discussions that carry little information.
Why not estimate everything?
A new Story has the least information it will ever have. A precise estimate at that point rarely pays off. At the same time you want a rough overview of the size of your Backlog as early as possible. Betterplan solves this by doing the early estimating for you and moving the precise estimate to the moment you know more about the Story.
How the provisional value is formed
The provisional value is the median of all estimates that exist for User Stories in the project so far. The median is the middle value of a sorted series. It is robust, because a single outlier such as a 100 barely moves it, and it changes only slowly. That makes it a stable starting value.
In detail:
- It learns. Every Story you estimate manually shifts the median. Teams often develop an unspoken default size, certain values come up more often than others. The median reflects that team default.
- It is an approximation, not the truth. With few estimates in the project the value is rough. From experience it becomes dependable from around 30 estimated Stories.
- You can override it at any time. As soon as you give a Story an estimate of its own, that one counts.
- Without any estimate there is no value. As long as not a single Story is estimated, the card shows no number and scope and widget count the Stories as 0. For Stories not yet scheduled, the Delivery Timeline then calculates with 3 points. Your first own estimate sets the yardstick for everything else (see Estimation basics).
The median is formed from the estimates of User Stories, and only User Stories show the ≈ and count with it in scope and widget. Dev and Project Stories and Workitems carry no Story Points, see Story types. Only the Delivery Timeline also uses the median as the bar length for Dev and Project Stories without an estimate.
How you recognize it in the interface
A Story without an estimate of its own shows the sign ≈ instead of the number, with the value in italics, for example ≈ 3. You see it
- on the cards in the Backlog Kanban and on the Iteration Board,
- in the Estimation field of the ticket details,
- on the bars of the Delivery Timeline, where the tooltip reads ≈ 3 points - using median estimation.
Sums that include provisional values, such as the Release sum in the Storyboard, carry an italic calculator icon instead of the sum sign Σ. The sums only appear when Show Estimation Details is switched on in the project settings.
In the Estimation View, the ? column collects all Stories without an estimate of their own.
The ≈ tells you that no decision stands behind the number yet. A Story with ≈ is not "unestimated and therefore unplannable" but estimated with your team's default.
Step by step with QuickCart
- In Prepare, open the Kanban. The Apply promo codes card in the Idea column shows ≈ 3: the median of the estimated Stories in QuickCart.
- The Estimation Widget at the bottom left already counts with this value, without you doing anything. The forecast and the Timeline include the Story too.
- When the Story becomes more concrete, click the indicator and choose a number, for example 5 points. From now on your estimate counts and the ≈ disappears.
- If you want to go back to the provisional value, choose No estimation in the same list. In the ticket details the entry is disabled while the Story has no estimate of its own yet.
When to estimate yourself
The provisional value is a starting value, not a permanent state. Estimate a Story yourself when
- it matures and its size becomes visible, at the latest on the way to Ready, before the team builds it,
- it is clearly bigger or smaller than the median would suggest,
- you need a forecast for a specific area, such as a Release, and accuracy matters there.
Everything else can wait. The moment of estimating moves to where the knowledge is.
Effect on forecast and cost
Because every User Story counts, all evaluations work from day one:
- Scope and remaining points: The median goes into the sum of all points, so into the scope in Progress, in the Estimation Widget and in the Release sums.
- Forecast and Timeline: The duration of a Story without an estimate follows from the median divided by the velocity, see How Betterplan forecasts.
- Cost: From the remaining points, the velocity and the cost per Iteration, the Estimation Widget derives the expected end and the remaining cost (see Estimating). To find out what one area costs, look it up there with a filter.
The more real estimates there are, the less the forecast depends on the median. It remains the safety net that spares you an empty calculation.
Background
The blog article Automatische fiktive Schätzungen describes the idea behind this. It is available in German only.