this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2026
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how many different ways can I say "I simply don't know yet?"
well give us a guess
could be one point... could be 50? I DON'T KNOW
well yeah but give it a guess anyway
Most teams I've been in would do a time boxed task (sometimes referred to as a spike) in those cases. Basically, you get a task with maybe 3 or 5 story points, and the goal is to either complete it or find out what it takes to do so. Then you make follow-up tasks for the next sprint. It's worked pretty well for me in those cases with a lot of uncertainty.
that does seem like a better method of working through the "I JUST DON'T FUCKING KNOW YET"s
Yeah thats tough. I hate when they do that. The beauty is, it doesnt matter. Usually I just drop a mid number and agile seems to give the flexibility to change that as you identify the true scope of work. Do what you can in the sprint, but eventually update the points to match or break it up and adjust points best you can at that point. Given I haven't been doing agile long, so I could be missunderstanding how it should work.
I love working on the edge of exploration, but also recognize it's going to be a lot of dipping the toes in and seeing what the water is like before I can reliably predict these things. I'm fortunate that no one on my team does what I do, so, sometimes they just accept "will report back next week with an estimate based on actual research".
also not getting ambushed with large hypotheticals beyond our actual tool chain support help but