with agile estimating, is it true some say to choose intervals like 1/2 to 1.5 days only? [closed]

Question

with agile estimating, is it true some say to choose intervals like 1/2 to 1.5 days only?

Answer 1

It tends to be a good rule of thumb (agile or not) that your tasks should be broken down into at most 1 - 2 day increments.

The idea is that if you have larger chunks than that then you haven't broken the task down enough and you will more likely miss the estimate and miss it by larger amounts of time than had you broke it down. Often when you break it down you discover your initial estimate was off and since you have broken the task down into more concrete tasks your estimate is now more accurate, more trackable and meaningful.

For tasks that are coming up on your to do list soon you should pay attention to this but for long range planning where you haven't necessarily thought out the feature in detail I think larger estimates / tasks not broken out for the feature is OK.

Here's a link to Joel Spolsky talking about this. Take a look at item #5 about half way down the page.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000245.html

Answer 2

In my experience, any estimate that's longer than 2 days is probably hiding serious work that should be broken down further. Such estimates have a very high probability of going over. Try to break everything down into smaller chunks so that no individual chunk costs more than 1-2 days.