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Which Agile Estimation Technique Should You Use?

Free tool
What are you trying to decide?

Question 1

Answer to see your recommended technique.

Why the "right" technique depends on the question

There is no single best agile estimation technique - Scrum Poker, T-shirt sizing, affinity estimation, and the rest each optimize for a different situation: how far along the backlog is, how big it is, whether the team has a shared baseline yet, and whether the answer even needs to be a number at all. Picking the wrong one for the moment is the most common estimation mistake, not picking a "bad" technique in the abstract.

This chooser walks through the same four questions that separate the rows in the agile estimation comparison matrix: what you're deciding, how much is being sized, whether your team has estimation history to lean on, and how formal the result needs to be.

The seven techniques it can recommend

  • Scrum Poker - private votes, simultaneous reveal, for sprint-ready stories on a team with a shared baseline.
  • T-shirt sizing - fast, rough, and works for new teams or non-engineers in the room.
  • Affinity estimation - silent relative grouping for sizing a backlog fast.
  • Bucket system - affinity estimation's big-backlog sibling, for 50+ items.
  • Three-point (PERT) estimation - a confidence interval for one epic, not a group consensus.
  • Wideband Delphi - anonymous rounds with a documented rationale, for high-stakes estimates.
  • Dot voting - not estimation at all; it answers "what matters most," not "how big is it."

What to do with the result

Most established teams end up combining two techniques rather than picking one forever: something fast and relative to keep a large backlog roughly ordered, and Scrum Poker for the handful of stories entering the next sprint with full context. Treat the chooser's answer as the technique to start with today, not a permanent commitment - re-run it as the situation changes.

Frequently asked questions

It asks what you’re deciding (size vs. priority), the scope being sized, and - depending on the path - whether your team has a steady velocity, how many items are involved, or whether the result needs a documented rationale, then maps those answers to one of seven named techniques.
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