Agile Retrospective: Should we re-estimate a user story mid-sprint? (30 minutes)

A common question for agile teams is this: "When, if ever, should we re-estimate user stories?"

Mike Cohn has written on the topic of re-estimation, and largely comes down on the size of avoiding re-estimation in most circumstances.

There is no fundamental rule about this in the Scrum Guide on Scrum.org.

So, essentially - when this issue comes up with your agile team, it's worth a conversation. This exercise will help your team reflect on why and when they might want to re-estimate.

In the exercise below, I put down a few preliminary thoughts in thought bubbles. I then asked the team what we should do when we realised mid-sprint that a user story was more complex than we'd originally estimated. 

Why and when did the team think it would be appropriate to:
  • Add a new story
  • Change the estimate mid-sprint
  • Take the hit, and just absorb the additional effort in the original estimate
As a preliminary exercise, you could also ask your team to capture their thoughts on an even more fundamental question: "Why do we estimate user stories?"




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