In Scrum the estimation effort and accuracy depend on the team. In this article, Jingjie Wang discusses the situation where the Scrum team tends to underestimate its capacity to deliver so to be sure that the product owner and the scrummaster are always happy at the end of each sprint because everything promised is deliver.
But in Scrum the productivity is as important as the production of the team and this is an issue that must be addressed. Jingjie Wang proposes two tools that can help to monitor the productivity of the team:
* Using story points rather than hours or days to estimate
* Recording and reviewing the velocity of each sprint
Jingjie Wang explains that improvement should not only come from monitoring productivity, but that it is also the job of the ScrumMaster to keep the team inspired and more aggressive on its commitment. In his case, he experiment by reducing the span of a Sprint from 15 days into 8 days, without decreasing the scope. All committed tasks were finished without any compromise in quality.