I respect the design of your articles, long but not and informative, yet you get a lot of them. Keeps me wishing to learn more. I will be sure to check each of them!

Goodbye

One approach that I think is really helpful is to estimate not just in hours, but in ranges. If you have a lot of uncertainty start with a large range (maybe this story will take 3 to 6 days). As you work on it, and gather more information, you can narrow those estimates down to smaller ranges as time goes by.

This model really helps communicate both the uncertainty, and the size of a story to stakeholders, and it helps everyone get a sense of progress as people narrow those estimates down.

I tend to avoid trying to estimate epics because the results are too imprecise to be useful, and also to avoid trying to estimate tasks as the results are too precise to be safe.

My understanding of the cone is that it prompts us to avoid doing estimation until later, at any scale. What I don’t quite get about your diagram is that it seems to suggest that we go down the cone once for the refinement of an epic to stories to tasks…but then what? Do we start again with another cone? Or, do we see our ability to estimate at a given scale improve over the lifetime of a whole project? My experience suggests the latter.