A Novel Approach to the Team Estimations in the Agile Software Development

Abstract

One of the main challenges that organizations are currently facing is resource allocation and planning. It is becoming very hard for the organization or team to achieve excellence in results and to deliver the requirements to the clients quickly and in a timely manner. Some of the road blockers and factors for that could be found in: poor initiation, wrong estimation, lack of clear objective, failure to communicate properly and everything done by one individual. In Agile IT operations, estimation techniques can be used to properly plan for resource allocation. This is especially important and it could be very challenging in the remote working environment that was introduced recently. The main objective of this paper is to propose a new decision support system for estimates. To achieve this, next two secondary objectives were defined: (a) review the existing estimation techniques that are widely used by companies for project management and proposed by other researchers; (b) explore different aspects of the estimation process and identify areas for the potential improvement, which is achieved by analyzing the results collected from the survey that was organized in the previous period. Findings from the secondary objectives were used to formulate improvements in the area of team consensus in estimates, logical approach when calculating the estimates and feedback, which are incorporated in the mentioned decision support system.