Estimation between front end and back end

[Louise]

Our team has trouble estimating. Back end and front end estimate in completely different ways, meaning that this is difficult to have common tickets between the 2 (for example for bugs, or hiring). Even FE team member don't estimate the same way, as usually our junior team member gets more story points done than the more senior one. Should everyone have the same base (e.g. around 20 SP per sprint)? Otherwise, does it mean we will always need to split estimation between what FE deliver and BE deliver?

[Carlos Garcia Navarro · Accepted solution]

Hi Louise, In an ideal world all team members that understand the story or task participate in the estimation, e.g. doing planning poker, until they agree on a number (points) for the story. If this can't be done, and the concern is for tickets that are common to both BE and FE developers, maybe you can split the story, e.g. you can make Story-1 into FE-Story-1 and BE-Story-1 and link them. On the other hand, Agile is a collection of good practices and teams can adapt depending on the culture and preferences. I'm curious about your use case: do FE and BE developers belong to the same team or to different teams? How does the team estimate stories? Thanks

[Louise]

Hi Carlos, thank you. We are one team (one sprint and one JIRA project), 2 FE and 1 BE. We usually split the stories so BE and FE have their own. So FE give estimates on FE tasks and BE on BE tasks. Most tasks are estimated during grooming (which depending on the projects, might be only BE/ only FE or both together). Separating stories between FE & BE might be an issue, as it might not foster collaboration between them, what do you think? In terms of estimation, it is done in a completely different way, which sometimes is tricky during planning, to make sure the work is distributed the right way. Should we try to have a common basis between FE and BE? Looking forward to receiving your advice!

[Carlos Garcia Navarro]

Hi @Louise

If BE and FE split their stories and they don't need to participate in the same story, I don't think BE developers need to estimate FE stories and vice versa. That doesn't mean they can't collaborate in other ways. E.g both FE and BE can still attend each other's backlog grooming session to learn about their roadmaps, and they should use that conversation to discuss dependencies. I wouldn't force different teams to have similar scale for points. Points are used to evaluate team velocity and if the team remains stable (people don't leave or rotate) then you should see that the number of points completed by sprint (velocity) is more or less flat. Then the team becomes predictable. I don't think points should be used to measure individual performance within the team or to compare different teams (or subteams). In other words, I wouldn't try to force a common basis.  I hope it helps,

Carlos

[Louise]

Thank you Carlos for your help, I agree!

[Adam Mrozik]

Hi @Carlos Garcia Navarro 

Very old topic, but I wanted to pick your brain on our scenario.

Currently because BE and FE are so different, we are grooming and estimating separately. However, we still want to encompass user-journey in the stories we create.

The issue we face is that we create a story "Add a button to do some serious stuff" and then inside of it two subtasks, one for BE and one for FE.

It is a very ellegant way in which Story is the place in which we agree on the interface, but other than that FE and BE can estimate and work separately.

The only issue is that Jira doesn't support subtask estimation. :) We of course can do it together, but the amount of time wasted for BE and FE to listen to other teams discussion is not something that is really worth it.

Two workarounds we have for this is estimate tasks linked to a story, or estimate only BE/FE tasks, while the other team appends to this estimate, where we track who estimated it with tags.

Do you have any suggestion what would be the best solution here?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Jira does support sub-task estimates, if you look at the "sigma" fields, you'll find they are an accumulation of estimates and work on issue and its sub-tasks.  It does not support the non-scrum practice of putting sprint estimates on sub-tasks because that's not what Scrum or Kanaban do - sub-tasks are a fragment of their parent issue, not independent items.

It looks like your BE and FE people are working in two different teams, so I would drop the use of sub-tasks to try to split up a single story by team.  I would strongly recommend that when your people look at a story and decide the other team needs to do some work on it as well, you clone the story, link it to the original, and then edit it so that it appears in the other team's backlog instead of their own.

[Carlos Garcia Navarro]

This is a good suggestion!