> The key part that may be missed is the “mob programming” or “pair programming” aspect where all the engineers on a team sit together and work through a story or milestones or epic to come up with a list one 1 point tasks.
My issue with this has always been that once an issue is straightforward enough to estimate as a 1 point task, you could’ve implemented the task already during the estimation process. The unknown effort is almost never in the writing code part, but figuring out the complexities around business rules & externalities.
But this doesn’t fix the process, it just moves the variability of effort & time into a different part of the process.
I have actually always had the same feeling about 1 pointers, but in this case you're talking about a collection of small tasks that make up a larger feature.
The larger feature probably couldn't have been implemented during the estimation process, but a single isolated small task could have.
My issue with this has always been that once an issue is straightforward enough to estimate as a 1 point task, you could’ve implemented the task already during the estimation process. The unknown effort is almost never in the writing code part, but figuring out the complexities around business rules & externalities.
But this doesn’t fix the process, it just moves the variability of effort & time into a different part of the process.