I was just taken by surprise in a backlog grooming meeting when we assigned time estimates to BA, dev, and QA tasks...but the story is not yet scheduled in any sprint and we are not yet assigning resources to the tasks.
This feels backwards to me, since:
- I can estimate my own darn tasks, thankyouverymuch.
- We're going to review/revise the estimates during sprint planning anyway.
- Each task should be estimated by the person who's going to do the work. (developers are nonfungible)
Should we really be trying to estimate to the work-hours level of precision at this point?
This question's discussion says no, since the backlog is made of stories, not tasks. And this one addresses time scales. Both relevant, but I'd particularly like to address the topic of estimating unassigned tasks.
[Side note: <3 <3 <3 your comments and answers and I wish I could upvote most of them, but my account is too new :s ]