Sizing stories with estimation games

Estimation, the process of predicting the most realistic effort required to deliver work items based on incomplete and uncertain input, is a typical challenge among development teams. Agile frameworks leverage relative estimating to mitigate this challenge. The power of relative estimating lies in accuracy over precision. If we were to ask you to look out the window and tell us how tall two buildings across the street are, chances are you couldn't give precise heights in feet or meters, but you could accurately state that one building is twice as tall as the other. Relative estimating allows teams to do the same thing with user stories. For reference, they start with a small, simple, and well-understood story (typically something that their team could build, test, and deploy in a day) and call it a 1-point story. They then estimate other stories relative to the 1-point story. For example, are they 2, 3, 5, or 8 times the volume, complexity...