And Who Should Estimate?

Who is responsible for providing estimations? This is a question that is frequently being asked by teammates, especially when tasks are divided in development and testing tasks.

Some points that might answer this question below:

1. User Stories should be estimated from the time they'll start until the time they'll be completed
2. All related work has to be estimated, including of course testing work
3. Developers and quality engineers might estimate their individual tasks but User Stories has to estimated in conjunction. There has to be agreement around how much it'll take to complete a User Story and not only about how long it will take to implemented it or just testing it
4. Providing estimations is a collaborative tasks, actually it's a team effort so everybody has to be involved
5. Teammates needs to be aware of the 'broader picture'. Sometimes teammates just care about their piece of work but forget about how that is connected to other's work
6. At the end doesn't really matter who provide what estimation, what it matters is that the team feels comfortable with the estimations. Being comfortable means that the team has a gut feeling that estimations don't see to far stretched from reality