Agile Team Trends 2026: Research Insights on Collaboration, Planning, and Delivery

TL;DR‍

Sprint planning feels harder because distributed/async work, tool consolidation, and Atlassian AI expose priority noise, software estimation problems, and hidden dependencies. This guide shares three team planning best practices - set a clear order of work, estimate together to surface risk, and close the loop with action-driven retrospectives, so team alignment and team collaboration improve and plans hold up.

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Sprint planning should not feel like a shouting match where the loudest voice wins. Yet for many teams it has become a long meeting that drains energy, creates a weak plan, and falls apart by Wednesday.

The problem is not that your team forgot how to plan. The world around the plan changed. People work across time zones. More decisions happen in comments and tickets than in rooms. And the plan lives in tools that other people (and AI‑powered search) will read later. When the audience shifts from "who was in the meeting" to "everyone who touches the work", the plan must be clearer and better organised.

On one hand, AI and asynchronous collaboration are on the rise. On the other, we have a direct link between strong delivery capabilities and better performance. And those two lines meet in planning - if inputs are unclear, you simply do the wrong things faster.

Want to dive deeper? Get our Guide to Building Predictable Delivery with Jira in 2026.

We believe planning feels harder because three foundational elements have broken down:

• How priorities turn into an order of work,
• How estimates show risk (not just numbers), and
• How suggestions for improvements turn into real work.

When these are weak, planning becomes an exercise in managing metal overload rather than building a clear path forward.

This piece examines why sprint planning has become so difficult, what changed in 2025 to make it worse, and most importantly, how teams can fix those three foundations so your plan still makes sense when someone who missed the meeting reads it two days later.

The mental load of modern planning

"Cognitive load" is simply the amount of mental effort a person can handle at once. Every team has a limit on how much information they can hold at any given moment, and planning meetings now push far past it.

At the same time, teams are asked to:

• Rank features against unclear goals,
• Estimate work they have not fully explored,
• Line up with platform teams whose time is uncertain,
• Balance different stakeholder requests,
• Figure out dependencies across systems they do not control, and
• Promise dates that others will track closely.

Plans are often made as if everyone is fully available and not also working on existing projects and tasks. And we all know quite well, that is never the case. When the mental load is too high, teams cannot safely own or change the software they're working on.

Planning then becomes a bottleneck where teams spend more time managing the complexity of coordination than actually coordinating. Decisions slip, assumptions go unchecked, and the plan that comes out is not a shared understanding but a weak compromise that satisfies no one.

Where priorities fail

In most planning sessions, "priority" has lost its meaning. Everything is P0. Everything is urgent. Everything needs to happen this sprint. If everything is top priority, nothing is.

Teams struggle to prioritise because there are too many moving parts at once: lots of stakeholders, long backlogs, and priorities that change week to week. Most prioritisation methods like MoSCoW, WSJF, and RICE, work for a small list and a small group, but they stop working when the list and the audience get big. Meetings get longer, scores become inconsistent, and re-ranking everything every time something changes isn’t practical. People also learn to “game” the numbers to push their item up.

There’s a second problem: these methods assume everyone agrees on what “value” means. In reality, sales, compliance, platform, design, and support often want different things. Numeric models (like simple scoring) miss those differences, because some trade-offs (like brand risk, customer trust, regulatory deadlines) are easier to discuss than to put into a single number.

A flat product backlog makes this worse. As Jeff Patton says, reading a backlog as one long list is like trying to understand a book by reading a list of sentences in random order - all the content is there, but the story is gone. Without the story, “priority” becomes a label people use to win arguments rather than a clear order of work.

Put simply, when the work and the number of voices grow, the usual techniques can’t keep up. If you don’t have a way to surface different perspectives and settle the trade-offs, decisions drift from strategy, plans keep shifting because they were never tied to outcomes, and engineers stop seeing why their work matters.

The estimation show

Teams are generally too optimistic about effort and too confident in their estimation numbers. On average, work takes about 30% longer than expected. Even when people say they’re 90% sure a range will cover the actual effort, it only does so 60–70% of the time.

Translation: confidence feels good, but it does not mean accuracy.

The deeper issue is how we estimate. It often becomes a solo guess instead of a shared check on risk.

Here's what actually happens - someone sees a work item called “Update API,” give it 5 points based on the title alone, and the team moves on. No one tests the assumptions behind the number.

Nobody talks about the auth layer changes implied by "update." Nobody brings up the database migration hiding in plain sight. Nobody checks whether the frontend team knows this change is coming.

And when those show up mid-sprint, the plan slips and trust drops.

After a few misses, behaviour shifts for the worse. People start padding their estimates - quietly rounding numbers up to feel safe. Product then starts pushing back. And estimation turns into negotiation, not learning.

A healthier signal to watch is the spread of estimates. ‍A wide spread of estimates isn't a problem to smooth over, but rather a signal to discuss assumptions. Most likely, there will be some difference in the initial estimates, giving each team member a great opportunity to talk about why their estimates were either higher or lower than the others.

The coordination cost of dependencies

When different teams own connected parts of the system, one team’s work often can’t move until another team makes a change. If those teams aren’t lined up, the change gets stuck.

This is common when how the software is wired doesn’t match how the teams are organised.

For example, the code says “Service A must change before Service B,” but A and B live in different teams with different priorities, sprint dates, and intake rules. The code requires coordination, but the org chart doesn’t provide it.

In large organisations, these small, work item‑level links are a constant source of delay. And it has only gotten worse in recent times.

Platform engineering has grown, with most features now touching shared services - auth, data platforms, CI/CD, component libraries. But planning often happens without the platform team in the room. No one checks their capacity, no one tests the order of work, and theres no agreement on intake windows or what to do when something is blocked.

So the plan looks ready on paper. Stories are sized. The sprint is committed. Then, three days in, someone says at stand‑up: “That API won’t be ready until next Tuesday,” or “The platform team is tied up,” or “Friday’s deployment window isn’t available.” Work waits, people wait, and money burns while nothing moves forward.

Dependencies increase complexity in any system. More complexity means more idle time as work passes between people or teams. Developers, then, often end up waiting for other work to wrap up before they can begin, creating inefficiencies that add no value but still cost payroll and budget.

What changed in 2025

Three shifts in 2025 made planning even harder:

1. Distributed work reduced live coordination.

Hybrid days replaced being in the same room every day. More work happens asynchronously. That means your written plans and notes like sprint goals, story maps, dependency notes, must explain what real-time conversations used to cover: why this work matters, what comes first, what won’t fit, who’s involved, and what could block you. Vague goals that could be fixed in person now fall apart across time zones.

2. Fewer tools, one system.

Teams cut vendors to reduce spend. Planning, estimation, and retrospectives moved into one solution, whether they fit well or not. While that reduces context‑switching, it also means that teams would have to lose specialised tools and custom workflows. It also means that stakeholders can see the full line from strategy to stories in one place, so your sprint goals, estimation notes, and retro/improvement actions will be read more closely.

3. Atlassian AI raised expectations.

Atlassian expanded Rovo across Jira and Confluence. Search, governance, and automation now connect conversations to issues and speed discovery. And the thing about AI is that it accelerates whatever direction you're already pointed. If goals are fuzzy, if estimates are guesses, and if dependencies are hidden - the automation will just help you go faster in the wrong direction.

The combination of all these changes is brutal - more coordination required, less overlap to coordinate in real-time, and higher penalties when plans fail because stakeholders can now see more of the picture.

Fixing the foundations in 2026: sprint planning best practices

The teams that will make planning work in 2026 will rebuild their foundations with three planning best practices. They’re simple, written rules the whole team follows. They live on the planning board and the work items, so they still make sense after hand-offs and across time zones.

1. Turn priorities into a clear order of work

“Priority” breaks when people don’t share the same idea of value. The fix is to agree on a single, visible order - why this first, then that, and what won’t fit this sprint.

Teams that get this right:

• Turn goals and outcomes into backlog work on a steady rhythm, not ad-hoc.

Once a month, product and delivery confirm objectives and break them into epics and small slices for the next 6–8 weeks. This keeps meaningful work in the pipeline without crowding the backlog assumptions and wishes that will change anyway.

• ‍Write testable sprint goals using a consistent template.

Objective, test, constraint. Set clearly defined goals, objectives, and metrics. What is the definition of done? How will the team know if they are successful? You should leave the sprint planning meeting with a clear idea of what needs to get done and what success looks like. For example, "Users can complete checkout using saved payment methods without re-entering card details" is much better than "improve checkout UX" every time. If you can't verify whether you hit it, it's a wish, not a goal.

• ‍Run a 30-minute review before scheduling anything.

Agree the order of work before fixing the dates. In 30 minutes with engineering, design, and platform teams: walk through the dependency list, check the capacity, and identify top risks. Output: ordered path to done, clear boundary of what won't fit that sprint, and a simple rule for how you’ll handle blocked items. This surfaces cross-team friction before it becomes a mid-sprint crisis.

• ‍Make dependencies visible where people actually plan.

Use one standard dependency field and two to three link types in Jira. Review the highest-risk links during planning - not when they block work on day three.

Easy Agile TeamRhythm's User Story Maps makes this process concrete - Build goals and outcomes at the top, work items that connect to those goals, and sprint or version swimlanes to clearly group them. Turn on dependency lines so blockers and cross-team links show up in planning. When epics ladder to outcomes, when the order of work explains itself, and when dependencies are visible on the same board - you stop rethinking priorities and start shipping.

2. Estimate together to find risk early

Estimation is not about hitting a perfect number. It is a fast way to identify risk while you can still change scope or order. Treat it as a short, focused conversation that makes hidden assumptions visible and records what you learned.

• ‍Estimate together, live.‍

Run Planning Poker from the Jira issue view so everyone sees the same title, description, acceptance criteria, designs, and attachments. Keep first votes hidden and reveal them all together (so the first number doesn’t influence the rest).

Easy Agile TeamRhythm help you run the estimation process in Jira, right where work lives. Capture the key points from the discussion in comments in the issue view. Sync the final estimate number back to Jira so your plan is based on current reality, and not old guesses from two weeks ago.

• ‍Record the reasoning, not just the number.‍

If a story moves from a 3 to an 8 after discussion, add two short notes on the work item:‍

- What changed in the conversation (the assumption you uncovered), and‍

- What’s still unknown (the risk you’re facing)

This helps the next person who picks it up and stops you repeating the same debate later.

• Stick to clear, simple scales.

Time estimates vary a lot by person. Story points help teams agree on the effort instead. If you ask each team member to estimate the amount of time involved in a task, chances are you'll get 5+ different answers. Timing depends on experience and understanding. But most team members will agree on the effort required to complete a work item, which means you can reach a consensus and move on with your story mapping or sprint planning much more quickly.

Maintain a small set of recent work items (easy/medium/hard) with estimates and actuals. When debates don't seem to end, point to this known work: "This looks like that auth refactor from June - that was an 8 and took six days including the migration script."

• ‍Limit committed work at roughly 80-85% of average capacity.

The space makes room for one improvement item, for unavoidable interrupts, and for reality. Setting unachievable goals sets your whole team up for failure. Failing to meet your sprint goals sprint after sprint is damaging for team motivation and morale. Use estimates to set reasonable goals as best you can. Consider team capacity, based on your past knowledge of how long tasks take to complete, how the team works, and potential roadblocks that could arise along the way.

Protect honesty in the estimate numbers. An estimate is a shared view of scope and risk, not a target to enforce. If it needs to change, change it after a team conversation - don’t override it. Remember what we said earlier - when estimation turns into negotiation, people start “padding” (quietly inflating a number to feel safe), and accuracy gets worse.

3. Closed the loop on improvements

Teams often fall into the trap of writing retrospective items as good intentions and not clear actions. Broad notes like “improve communication” or “fix our process” sound fine on paper, but they don’t tell anyone what to do next.

‍Action items are often ignored during a retrospective. Everyone focuses on engaging people in getting their ideas out, and not as much time is spent on the action items and what's going to be done or changed as a result.

• ‍Start every retro by checking last sprint’s actions.‍

Ten minutes. Did we close them? If closed, did they help? What did we learn? This way, the team acts on what they learned straight away and everyone can see what changed.

• ‍Turn insights into Jira work items immediately.‍

Each action needs an owner, a due date, a link to the related work, and a clear definition of done. If you can’t assign it immediately, it’s not actionable, it’s a complaint.

Easy Agile TeamRhythm's Retrospective lives right inside Jira, attached to your board. Turn retrospective items into Jira issues with owners and dates, link them to an epic or backlog item, and slot at least one into the next sprint. Track incomplete action items and repeating themes on the same page as delivery work.

• ‍Make space for one improvement item every sprint.‍

Pick one action item for a sprint and finish it before starting another, so it doesn't get pushed aside by feature work. Treat action items like a feature: estimate it, track it, and close it with a note about the result and impact.

• ‍Write a short impact note when you close an action.‍

A retro should give people energy. It should help them see that we're improving, that their voice matters, that something got better because of something they said.

Write a one-line impact note for every closed action item, ideally with a small metric - for example, "Batched PR reviews into two daily slots - median review time dropped from six hours to 90 minutes." This teaches the next team, justifies the investment, and shows that retro action items increase the team's capacity to deliver, and are not admin overheads.

What changes when you follow the planning best practices

Teams with solid sprint planning foundations rarely talk about them. They’re not on stage explaining their process. They’re just shipping steady work while everyone else wonders what their secret is.

There is no secret. The best teams have simply stopped treating planning as a meeting to survive and started treating it as a system of best practices that compound over time.

The mental load of planning sessions does not go away. But it shifts. Instead of processing all of it live in a room under time pressure, these teams have recorded their answers into written plans and notes that do the thinking for them.

The user story map explains what matters and why. The order of work shows dependencies before they block work. The estimation scores and notes capture not just numbers but the assumptions behind them. Retro action items sit next to product work, so the next sprint benefits from what the last one learned.

Fix the best practices and your sprint planning challenges will reduce. Not perfectly. Not forever. But enough that planning stops feeling like a crisis and starts feeling like what it should be: a calm view of what is possible now, with simple ways to adjust as you learn.

The cost of unclear plans is rising. AI speeds up what you feed it. Stakeholders can see more details easily. Work happens across time zones. In that world, clarity isn't a nice-to-have - it's a basic requirement.

The teams that will do well in 2026 aren't the ones with better tools or smarter frameworks. They’ll be the ones with a few simple best practices written into the plan and the work items, so handovers are easy, others can check and understand them, and they still make sense after the meeting.

The Guide to Team Collaboration with Jira in 2026 examines how Atlassian's recent moves and other work trends in 2025 change the way team plan, and what you can do now to avoid falling behind.

‍Big change starts with small habits

When teams seek improvement, the temptation is often to pursue big changes. A new framework, process, or tool feels exciting. But in daily work, it’s not usually these sweeping moves that make the biggest difference.

Progress often comes from something quieter. Small, consistent habits shape how a team collaborates, how trust grows, and how improvement is sustained. Like steady care in a garden, these everyday actions build strength over time. At first, they may seem invisible, but together they create a culture where growth is expected.

Many teams already run retrospectives or reviews. But they are often irregular, repetitive, or disconnected from real work. Actions get logged, but not acted on. Some voices dominate, while others go unheard. This is why retros can feel like gestures rather than habits. The ceremony exists, but the follow-through is fragile.

Why habits matter more than gestures

Planting once and walking away does not grow a garden. In the same way, a single retrospective or review will not create change. What matters is the regular rhythm of listening, reflecting, and acting.

Habits turn intentions into results. A team that reflects consistently, values every voice, and follows through on actions builds trust and resilience. Improvement stops being a rare event and becomes part of the workflow. Step by step, progress compounds.

Yet in many organisations, retrospectives and reviews are still treated as optional. They are the first thing cut when deadlines press. Without consistent care, insights fade, and the cycle breaks. The ceremony remains, but the habit that gives it power is missing.

The reality teams face

Teams want to get better, but reflection often falls short. Common challenges include:

• Sessions feel repetitive or lack focus.
• Outcomes are captured but not acted on, resurfacing repeatedly in future review cycles (adding to point one).
• Insights live outside workflows (think Jira for software teams or Confluence for marketing teams) and are forgotten as daily work requirements dominate.
• Louder voices dominate, quieter ones hold back.
• Retros are inconsistent, skipped, or rushed.

These challenges weaken trust. People disengage because they doubt reflection leads to change. The result is a cycle where time is spent in retros, but little improvement follows. Like the neglected soil in our garden analogy, the conditions for growth disappear.

What happens when reflection becomes a habit

When reflection is a habit, retrospectives and reviews shift from a chore to a valuable practice. Here is what changes:

• Teams pause regularly, not just in crisis.
• Every voice is heard and considered.
• Actions stay connected to work in Jira.
• Clear ownership ensures progress is visible.
• Sessions feel purposeful and safe, building trust.

The role of the ceremony

Retrospectives, reviews, and debriefs give teams space to pause and act. They are not solely about templates (which can help) or rituals. At their best, they create safety, learning, and ownership.

When run well, ceremonies create rhythm. They remind teams to step back and ask: How are we working together? This rhythm surfaces issues early, strengthens collaboration, and builds confidence that problems will be addressed.

But ceremonies only work when they are consistent and connected. A retro once in a while will not resolve recurring blockers. A review that loses actions will not improve delivery. Habits are what make the difference.

Small habits that build stronger teams

Here are the habits that matter most:

• Reflect regularly, not occasionally. Short, frequent retros uncover issues early.
• Keep preparation simple. Templates and light structure save time.
• Create a safe and inclusive space. Anonymous input helps every voice be heard.
• Connect actions to work. Capture them directly in Jira, where delivery happens.
• Focus on follow-through. Revisit actions, even small ones, to show progress.
• Build momentum with small wins. Fixing one blocker compounds over time.
• Celebrate progress. Recognition reinforces the value of reflection.

With these habits, retros and reviews shift from overhead to support. Tools help, too. A free retro tool can make it significantly easier to plant and protect these habits without the overhead.

Making it easier

This is where Review by Easy Agile helps. Review is a free retro tool inside Jira that makes retrospectives, reviews, and debriefs more structured, inclusive, and action-focused. It’s designed to make good habits simple to start and sustain.

With Review, teams can:

• Use built-in templates to cut prep time.
• Gather anonymous input to create safety.
• Prioritise ideas with voting and reactions.
• Capture owned actions directly in Jira boards and backlogs.

Because Review is Jira-native, there are no extra logins, no context switching, and no risk of insights disappearing. Reflection becomes part of the workflow, not an add-on. And because it is free, any team can start today.

Small steps, big outcomes

The biggest improvements rarely arrive in one leap. They grow from small, steady steps: fixing a blocker, simplifying a process, making space for every voice.

Consistent retros and reviews turn reflection into progress. Over time, these small habits create a culture of trust and improvement that sustains itself.

Healthy teams, like healthy gardens, are not built overnight. They grow because people return regularly to care for them. Each small act compounds into stronger collaboration, better delivery, and greater trust.

This applies beyond software. Any team that takes time to reflect and act can build habits that help them thrive.

Start planting the seeds of better teamwork with Review by Easy Agile, a free retro tool in Jira.

TL;DR

‍Agile estimation challenges are rarely about the number. Planning poker is useful when teams treat vote spreads as signals about scope, risk, and dependencies. Software team alignment during estimation improves sprint predictability more than chasing velocity. Velocity alone cannot forecast capacity because context changes across sprints. Coordination work must live in Jira as first-class items, or retro actions will not get done. Easy Agile TeamRhythm keeps planning and estimation in one place: story mapping for sequence, planning poker on the issue for shared context, and retrospective actions that turn into tracked work. The new ebook, Guide to Building Predictable Delivery with Jira in 2026, explains how to plan with clarity, align on effort, and turn problems into progress. The outcome is fewer rollovers, clearer handoffs, and more reliable delivery.

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Estimation in software teams has become a performance ritual. Planning poker sessions run smoothly, story points get assigned, and even velocity charts trend upward.

Yet research analysing 82 studies found five recurring reasons why estimates fail: information quality, team dynamics, estimation practices, project management, and business influences.

The point is, the problem with estimations runs deeper than accuracy - it's about what teams miss whilst focusing on the number.

When a team estimates a story and three people say it's a 3 whilst two say it's an 8, that spread contains more value than whatever final number they settle on. The disagreement signals different assumptions about scope, reveals hidden dependencies, exposes risks before code gets written. But most teams treat the spread as a problem to resolve rather than intelligence to extract. They discuss just long enough to reach consensus, record the number, move on.

The estimation ritual runs perfectly, while the coordination that estimation should enable never happens.

Why the number misses the point

Communication, team expertise, and composition decide how reliable an estimation will be, far more than the technique itself.

A team of senior engineers who've worked together for years will generate different estimates than a newly formed team with mixed experience, even looking at identical work. Neither set is wrong - they reflect different realities.

Problems emerge when organisations ignore this context and treat estimates as objective measurements.

Story points get summed across teams. Velocity gets compared across squads. Estimates meant to help one group coordinate become data points in dashboards, stripped of the shared understanding that gave them meaning.

What planning poker actually reveals

Planning poker works when teams use it to promote collaboration, uncover risks, and address uncertainties proactively. Those benefits vanish when teams rush past disagreement to reach a number.

Someone who estimates low might:

• Know a shortcut from previous work
• Have solved something similar before
• Understand a technical approach others haven't considered

Someone who estimates high might:

• Have spotted an integration challenge
• Questioned an assumption in the requirements
• Remembered something that broke last time
• Identified a missing dependency

Both pieces of knowledge matter more than splitting the difference.

Teams that skip this interrogation lose their only reliable way to discover what they don't yet know. Later, when work takes longer than estimated, they blame the estimation technique. They should blame the coordination failure that happened during estimation.

How team members add context

Research indicates that even team members whose skills aren't needed for an item contribute valuable questions during planning poker.

The database person asks about data volume. The designer notices a missing edge case. The platform maintainer flags a version incompatibility.

None of them are trying to make the estimate bigger to protect themselves. They're raising legitimate technical considerations that affect how much work is actually involved. These questions reveal real complexity the team needs to account for. That's different from someone saying "Let's call it an 8 instead of a 5, just to be safe" without any specific reason (that's called "padding", and a team must avoid that at all costs).

When estimation becomes a solo activity or a quick management decision, all that context disappears. Work looks simpler than it is, not because anyone lied, but because key voices never got heard.

Why team coordination matters more at scale

Coordination ranks as one of the biggest challenges in large-scale software projects, particularly with complex codebases and multiple teams working simultaneously. As organisations scale, coordination problems increase:

• Dependencies multiply across teams. What used to be a conversation between two people in the same room now requires checking another team's roadmap, finding out who owns a component, and waiting for their sprint to align with yours.
• Handoffs increase between specialists. A feature that one full-stack developer could build now needs a frontend specialist, a backend specialist, a platform engineer, and a data analyst - each working on different schedules with different priorities.
• The margin for error shrinks. When you're coordinating work across five teams instead of one, a single miscommunication or missed dependency can block multiple teams at once, not just delay one work item.
• Assumptions travel further from their source. The product manager who spoke to the customer isn't in the room when the backend developer makes a technical decision. The context that shaped the original requirement gets lost through layers of handoffs and documentation.

Estimation sessions are often the only moment when everyone involved in delivering work actually talks about it before starting. Treating that time as a box-checking exercise to produce velocity data is one of the biggest mistake you could make as a team.

When estimates protect plans instead of revealing risks

Let's look at a familiar scenario. A team commits to eight features based on historical velocity. Three sprints in, two features ship and the rest need another month. Marketing campaigns get delayed. Customer pilots get postponed. Executive presentations need rewriting.

The team "missed commitment," so stakeholders lose confidence.

Next quarter, product managers add extra weeks to every timeline just to be safe. Engineering leaders give longer forecasts they know they can beat rather than their honest best estimate. Everyone protects themselves, the system slows down, trust erodes further.

Now, step back - why did the team commit to eight features in the first place? Usually because velocity suggested they could complete them.

The velocity number reflected what they'd delivered in the past. What it didn't reflect was whether those sprints had taught them anything, whether dependencies were worsening, whether technical debt was compounding, or whether the work ahead resembled the work behind.

Why velocity numbers mislead

Velocity treats delivery capacity as stable when it's dynamic.

Teams get faster as they remove friction and slower as complexity increases. Last sprint's number is already outdated, yet sprint planning sessions treat it as a reliable forecast.

Consider what velocity cannot tell you:

• Whether the team learned from previous mistakes
• Whether technical debt is slowing new work
• Whether dependencies have become more complex
• Whether the upcoming work requires unfamiliar technology
• Whether key team members will be available

Better agile estimation techniques won't fix coordination problems. But teams can fix coordination problems if they treat coordination itself as work that deserves attention.

Why fixing coordination problems matters for estimation

Teams that have messy estimation sessions usually know exactly what's wrong.

Someone will say it in standup: "We should really refine stories before planning."

Another person mentions it in Slack: "We need to check dependencies earlier."

It even comes up in the retrospective: "Our estimates are all over the place because we don't understand the work."

The insights are there. What's missing is follow-through.

Look at your last three retrospectives. How many action items got completed before the next one?

The average completion rate for retro action items sits around 0.33% - teams basically complete almost none of them. And that's mainly because the improvement actions exist outside the system that schedules work.

During retrospectives, teams identify real problems:

• "Our estimation sessions run too long because we don't refine stories beforehand"
• "We keep getting surprised by infrastructure work that's not in our backlog"
• "We never follow up on the spikes we create"
• "Dependencies block us mid-sprint because we didn't check capacity with other teams"

All true. All important. Then the retrospective ends, everyone returns to their sprint board, and those insights have nowhere to go.

The backlog contains features. The sprint contains stories. And improvement work lives in meeting notes, if anywhere. So it doesn't compete for capacity, doesn't get assigned an owner, doesn't get tracked, and doesn't get done.

How to make improvement work visible

Usage data from Easy Agile TeamRhythm showed teams completing only 40-50% of their retrospective action items. After releasing features to surface and track incomplete actions, completion rates jumped to 65%.

The mechanism was simple:

1. Convert retrospective insights into Jira work items
2. Give each one an owner
3. Slot them into upcoming sprints like any other work
4. Make incomplete action items from the previous retros more visible

When teams actually complete their retrospective actions, estimation gets better without changing the estimation technique. Stories get refined before planning, so there's less guesswork. Dependencies get checked earlier, so there are fewer surprises. The team builds shared understanding over time, so the spreads in planning poker get narrower and the discussions get shorter.

As you can see, this is a ripple effect.

Coordination problems compound when ignored, but they also improve when treated as real work.

A team that never fixes its planning problems will have messy estimation sessions next quarter, and the quarter after that. A team that deliberately improves coordination will gradually need less time to reach better software team alignment and their estimates will become more reliable as a byproduct.

What this means for tools and practice

Most planning tools were built to manage tasks, not support the conversations that help teams coordinate around those tasks. The challenge now is making coordination visible and trackable in the same place where delivery work happens.

Easy Agile TeamRhythm keeps coordination work alongside delivery work.

✅ User Story Map shows how work connects to goals, making sequencing a shared discussion instead of someone's private spreadsheet.

✅ Planning poker happens inside the Jira issue, where everyone sees the same acceptance criteria and attachments - so the spread of estimates becomes a trigger for conversation, not a number to agree on.

✅ Retrospective actions convert directly into backlog items that get added into upcoming sprints, so improvement work gets the attention it deserves.

The stakes for getting this right are rising. Atlassian's push towards AI assistance means your planning documents will be read by more people and processed by more systems. When Rovo searches your Jira instance, it surfaces whatever you've written - clear goals and explicit dependencies, or vague titles and hidden assumptions.

A fuzzy sprint goal doesn't just confuse your team. It confuses the dozen people across three time zones reading your board asynchronously, the automation trying to identify relevant work, the AI assistant trying to generate status updates, and the stakeholders trying to understand progress.

Where this leads

The teams that succeed over the next few years won't be the ones with the most sophisticated agile estimation techniques or the highest velocity scores.

They'll be teams where planning poker uncovers risks instead of producing commitments. Where retrospectives generate work items instead of wishful thinking. Where coordination shows up in Jira instead of getting discussed in conversations that disappear.

They'll be teams that figured out estimation was never about the numbers. It was always about getting everyone pointed in the same direction, with their eyes open, before the work starts.

The number is just what gets written down. The conversation that takes the team to the number is where the real work lies.