Are story points estimated by the product owner or the development team?
The short answer is the development team - learn why! Came across the following question on the Atlassian community forums:
Are story points estimated by the product owner or the development team?
The short answer is the development team. Why? Because development teams are most knowledgeable about the work at hand, have the best insights into what needs to be done and the effort it takes.
Should the Product Owner or the Scrum master provide estimates?
In my mind, it makes sense only if they are knowledgeable about the codebase. Because else they don't have a good grasp of what building the software takes. For this reason, working on a project in the role of a product owner or a scrum master, I have never provided an estimate. Because in these roles I have never had the bandwidth to also work on the codebase.
What's wrong with providing an estimate, not being on the development team?
The idea behind having only the development team providing the estimate is that the dev team knows best the state of their codebase and what needs to change in order to implement the story under question. So the problem is people from outside the team really don't have a firm ground for their estimate.
Why would someone not on the dev team, with less knowledge about the work, want to give an estimate?
Why would someone not on the dev team want to give an estimate?
There can be couple of reasons:
- The person truly believes the work can be done in less time
- The person thinks the effort is too much compared to the value it brings
- To influence the team to come up with a lower estimate, i.e. using anchoring
- To negotiate a "better estimate" with the team
In case 1 and 2 discuss the following points with your stakeholder:
- why the estimated effort is this much
- what part of the effort takes most time
- explain where the biggest unknowns are And find ways in how you can lower the effort by reducing the scope.
In cases 3 and 4 your stakeholder is heading down the wrong path. Wrote a post covering how to handle these cases here: "Someone saying 'No, it's less effort than that!'
