Why software projects take longer than you think – a statistical model
The interesting thing is that by the central limit theorem, the mean of a mean is normally distributed.  This is extremely helpful.  Here&#x27;s what I suggest you do:<p>Same size your stories to small values.  Do 30 stories in a sprint and take the mean.  Do 30 sprints and take the mean of the sprint.  What you get is the mean amount of time to do a sprint of 30 stories.  What&#x27;s amazing is that this estimate will be normally distributed.  You can measure the variance to get error bars.<p>Of course 900 stories to get good estimates ;-)  However, imagine that your stories averaged 2 days each.  Imagine as well that you have a team of 10 people.  That means that you will finish a &quot;sprint&quot; of 30 stories in 6 days (on average).  30 sprints is 180 days -- the better part of a year, but you probably don&#x27;t need a 95% confidence interval.<p>You will find that after a few sprints, you&#x27;ll be able to predict the sprint length pretty well (or if you set your sprints to be a certain size, then you will predict the number of stories that will fit in it, with error bars).<p>The other cool thing is that by doing this, you will be able to see when stories are outliers.  This is a highly undervalued ability IMHO.  Once a story passes the mean plus the variance, you know you&#x27;ve got a problem.  Probably time to replan.  If you have a group of stories that are exceeding that time, then you may have a systemic estimation problem (often occurs when personnel change or some kind of pressure is being applied to the team).  This kind of early warning system allows you to start trying to find potential problems.<p>This is really the secret behind &quot;velocity&quot; or &quot;load factor&quot; in XP.  Now, does it work on a normal team?  In my experience, it doesn&#x27;t because groups of people are crap at calmly using statistics to help them.  I&#x27;ve had teams where they were awesome at doing it, but that was the minority, unfortunately.