Estimating time of project with user stories

“In 1914 Henry Ford noticed that his employees worked best when limited to eight hours. After eight hours, their productivity began to slow down.That's why Ford Motor established the 40 hour work week. The change increased their productivity and many companies soon followed. That's why the 40 hour work week became standard.”(Rose 00.00-00.20) Thanks to Henry Ford we now have 40 hour work weeks,that being said we also adopted this into Agile due to the higher productivity that was shown in this.

When starting agile, the scrum master needs to be able to estimate how much time each task should take. A perfect agile project, is said to “run like a marathon”(Rose 01:20-01:22 ), meaning “a rigorous but consistent work pace”.(Rose 01:20-01:25 )   But how can the scrum master or the team members estimate how much time it will take them to finish an individual task? This is where calculating velocity comes in.

Velocity is defined in the video as “How much work teams have done and how much they’ll do in the future.”(Rose 01:42-01:52 ) A better way to explain it is basically, a team will look over it’s past sprint to see how long it took to finish each task and will apply it to the next sprint.

So, now you understand what velocity is but how would a scrum master and their team use it practically to estimate how much time a project will need? Well, a scrum master and their team places story points, on each user story, the scrum master would place a higher point value on the more time consuming/more complex stories and lower point values on less time consuming/less complex stories and after a couple of sprints average these points out to get the velocity. It can become frustrating at first to estimate an accurate time but if a group continues to practice it, with time, can become more accurate and be a huge benefit for the team. With this a team can estimate how long it will take them to complete a project and if a team wants to be more active they can even figure out how long it should take each sprint.