How can the team work in scrum with tasks that are unpredictable in time?

[Alina Borzakovskaa]

We are team of juniors and we are working with new technology. Our problem is that we don't know how to work in scrum with tasks that are unpredictable in time. As a result we miss commitments and have unpleasant meetings with our manager. How can we estimate new and unpredictable tasks in scrum?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Adjust your estimation and planning, and manage expectations.  You should not be working on things that can't be estimated, because you just don't know what they're going to be.  If you can't size something, you can't know if you might complete it in the sprint, so you should not be bringing it into a sprint until you can size it.  But in real life it happens.  I've seen two approaches:

• The simple one - vastly over-estimate.  Tell your manager you can't estimate it, so you're going to have to assume 40+ story points, no matter how simple it looks, maybe making it into an Epic so you can break it down into estimate-able stories.  It's blunt, but your manager cannot argue with it.
• The more sophisticated one - don't estimate it until you can.  Create a new story for "estimating this unpredictable story" and make the difficult one dependent on it.

[Alina Borzakovskaa]

Nic, thanks a lot! We will try.