Common Estimation Anti-Patterns to Avoid
What are the biggest mistakes teams make during estimation? Our planning poker sessions feel productive but our estimates are consistently wrong. What are we missing?
Anchoring bias is #1. When the tech lead speaks first or reveals their estimate early, everyone gravitates toward it. Junior devs especially just copy senior estimates. Solution: simultaneous reveal only, no discussing estimates before cards are shown. We caught ourselves doing this for months before fixing it.
Sandbagging - padding estimates 'just in case'. Kills velocity. When every 3-pointer becomes a 5 'to be safe', you're lying to yourselves and stakeholders. Estimate honestly, track accuracy, adjust over time. Don't pad.
Estimating implementation before understanding requirements. Teams jump straight to 'how' before clarifying 'what'. Spend 5 minutes on acceptance criteria FIRST. Half our estimation errors disappeared when we enforced this.
Groupthink - averaging estimates without discussion. Two people say 5, one says 13, you call it 8. Wrong! The 13 likely sees something others missed. Always discuss outliers, especially high estimates. They're usually right.
Estimating testing/deployment separately from development. A story isn't done until it's deployed and tested. If you estimate coding at 3 but testing adds 5, the story is 8. Estimate the whole workflow or you'll chronically under-estimate.