I saw a Linkedin post recently, saying time / story points estimation is actually a waste of time. I can hardly agree on this statement.
Time estimates
Speaking about time estimate, it is usual and compulsory when you work under waterfall methodology. Time is always a project constraints, and project managers are always expected to provide the estimated timeline for a project reporting to stakeholders. FTE refers to “full-time equivalent”, which is a crucial term in project management.
At consulting agencies, the FTE is always critical when we determine the contract with clients. It would then be the budget to the project and we have to make sure we will not encounter cost overrun, which may potential mean a net loss for the business.
Story points estimates
I believe the statement actually refers to projects under scrum. Still, I believe story points estimation brings values to both the team of developers, and business. In my experience, I asked the team members to take a look on the new stories every 2 weeks (especially those in high priority). Each team member will be able to ask questions at each story in order to eliminate misunderstanding. And, we will perform a voting on the story points. Often, the points from each member would not vary a lot, and we just pick the median. However, sometimes, we could get a big difference among the team members. This will be a great opportunity to allow the team to discuss and share, and it may possibly facilitate the actual development by understanding different point of views, or possibly raise risk factors to be considered managed as sub-tasks or separate stories. And, when we found the story point was too large, the team may also break down into smaller stories.
Final words
I understand different teams may do differently. From my experience, it did not take that long when I worked with the team to estimate the story points. I agree that if the stories are all small, we actually do not need to estimate one by one since they are all the similar in difficulties / effort. However, the process to determine whether the stories are small enough, is actually an estimation process, you just do not have a number to each story separately indeed.