It’s becoming clear to organizations adopting Agile methods that one still needs to estimate how long a project or a release of a product will take.  It won’t suffice for businesses to simply take guesses or accept unreasonable constraints.  We must be able to derive credible estimates, based on a history of similar projects.  But how can we estimate a project in advance, while still maintaining the ability to manage the backlog in an Agile manner?

In this article, we’ll answer that question, compare release-level estimation to the techniques used for iteration estimation, and give some pointers on getting started with release estimation in an Agile environment.