If you are still guessing delivery dates? If so, stop!

When you work in fixed-time slots (sprints) and you keep track of how many stories, or story points, you complete in each slot, you can always calculate when a story is expected.

Do not

• Dude-Guess (swedish: ”killgissa”) delivery days.
• Negotiate deliver dates with stakeholders. You can negotiate priorities — should we do A before B instead?
• Confuse deadlines and estimates. A deadline is, for example, Singles´ Day which is exactly on November 11. A deadline cannot change, but you can make many different plans for delivering as much value as possible before the deadline. An estimate, on the other hand, always comes with an uncertainty. For example, we will deliver between 2 and 3 weeks from now.

Do

• Use team velocity to calculate delivery dates. If a story is 40 points down in the backlog, and you have velocity between 20 and 25 and 2 weeks sprints, then the story will be done in 2–3 weeks. If stakeholders says it is too late, you can negotiate the priority, but you cannot change team velocity or estimated points.
• Isolate uncertainty to when you estimate story complexity. If you have 10–15 stories in a sprint, and you calculate velocity as the moving average of the last three sprints, the errors even out.