> Estimating in something other than hours still needs to be converted for hours in order to be useful
Yes. Did you see the part of my comment where I explained how you do that?
The fact that this is the most accurate estimation method is well established in research. You can get close with some other methods, like tri-partite estimation, but they're more cumbersome.
WHY it helps so much to abstract away from direct time estimation, has a few going theories. One obvious reason is that the abstraction and tracking the relationship to real time brings into play the Law Of Large Numbers, the same mathematical law that allows casinos to profit on games of pure chance. The more sprints you have under your belt, the more your conversion rate averages in unexpected external influences like illness, windows updates, upstream problems, etc, in proportion to their actual occurrence rates.
Another of the most popular theories is that human brains have specialized areas/heuristics for predicting time vs predicting effort, which come with different cognitive biases.
Fundamentally I can't give you a definitive answer to why, only that speaking in terms of difficulty with engineers, and converting to time to talk to business planning, is well demonstrated to greatly improve accuracy in controlled studies. In fact, the best estimators, when predicting time, still predict 130% of the time needed for a complex task. Using abstracted measures it is not unusual to see accuracy within 5% or 10% of actual.
> The fact that this is the most accurate estimation method is well established in research. You can get close with some other methods, like tri-partite estimation, but they're more cumbersome.
You keep talking about the research, is there any chance you can provide some references? I'd like to review this research as what you say sounds plausible and I'd like to know more.
Yes. Did you see the part of my comment where I explained how you do that?
The fact that this is the most accurate estimation method is well established in research. You can get close with some other methods, like tri-partite estimation, but they're more cumbersome.
WHY it helps so much to abstract away from direct time estimation, has a few going theories. One obvious reason is that the abstraction and tracking the relationship to real time brings into play the Law Of Large Numbers, the same mathematical law that allows casinos to profit on games of pure chance. The more sprints you have under your belt, the more your conversion rate averages in unexpected external influences like illness, windows updates, upstream problems, etc, in proportion to their actual occurrence rates.
Another of the most popular theories is that human brains have specialized areas/heuristics for predicting time vs predicting effort, which come with different cognitive biases.
Fundamentally I can't give you a definitive answer to why, only that speaking in terms of difficulty with engineers, and converting to time to talk to business planning, is well demonstrated to greatly improve accuracy in controlled studies. In fact, the best estimators, when predicting time, still predict 130% of the time needed for a complex task. Using abstracted measures it is not unusual to see accuracy within 5% or 10% of actual.