Supporting Feature Estimation with Risk and Effort Annotations
The accuracy of effort estimates is an important factor for the success of a project. In agile projects, these estimates are often obtained through the structured group estimation process of planning poker. To increase the accuracy of such estimates, we propose to annotate user stories with symbols that highlight risk and effort drivers and thus give all team members a better understanding of a project's challenges. In this paper, we report on the results of a study that examines the effect of using risk and effort annotations on project teams' level of shared understanding, estimation accuracy and estimation bias. Our results show that the use of annotations in planning poker increases estimation accuracy.