Questions arising from the Scrum process we thought we knew the answer to …

September 6, 2023

By Stripe One

Here they are ..

Should we size bugs?

I’ve worked with Scrum teams where they were very opposed to sizing any bugs. This is due to the very nature of bugs being ‘unknown’.

However, if we are trying to track velocity on a project this can give us a percentage of unaccounted for work (depending on how many bugs are in each sprint). So, can we consider sizing them? Perhaps. For some bugs we might have an equal confidence in knowing the solution as we do with a typical User Story. So, in these instances ‘yes’ we should consider sizing the bugs so we can account for the effort on them during a sprint.

There will be occasions where the development team have very little understanding of the cause of the bug, and for these we should likely create a time-boxed spike and to understand more about the behavior and then bring the ‘sized’ but into sprint after that.

How do we decided on the size of a User Story if there are differing estimates?

One person estimates 13 the other 5, how do we come to a conculsion.

Should we even be using relative sizing at all? Is it helpful?

Should we size?

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