I’ve had one of my colleagues share some of the practices of the Agile project he is currently in. I found out they don’t size their user stories. Apparently, the leads make the commitments and cascade these to the rest of the team without their inputs. So I guess, naturally, the tendency would be for user stories to spill over to the next sprint, and he did confirm that is what happens. And that’s also the argument given for why they don’t need to size anyways because the work just spills over. But maybe if they did some sizing with the rest of the team, they would have improved on knowing whether they can commit something in the sprint or not.
I tried to google for whether there’s a flavor of Agile where they don’t size. I’ve heard there is such a thing as #noestimates, but having no estimates isn’t the same thing as no commitments, right? I reckon regardless of whether you size or not, your objective should still be to have the team in a better position to deliver its commitments.
So I’m just curious whether there’s such a flavor of Agile where user stories aren’t sized? And whether anyone can share any success stories of getting by without sizing (but of course still meeting commitments)?
I initially posted the question in Twitter/Medium but didn’t really get any responses. I’m hoping I get lucky here.