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Comment by SketchySeaBeast | Hacker News Reader

> Everything gets a T-shirt size. Roughly, "small" is no more than a couple person-days, "medium" is no more than a couple person-weeks, "large" is no more than a couple person-months.

That's pretty much exactly what I've ended up using on past projects - a little more fine grained (start at a half day, went up to months), but that was my approach as well, and if I didn't know everything it went up a size.

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Did you find much differentiation between half day and couple of days? Especially because some things that might take a couple days end up taking 30 mins (some efficient package already exists), and some half day things end up taking a couple days, so it comes out in a wash?

Half day items were strictly bound, well know problem, like a label change, or a piece of functionality I knew by heart to be that size. I found that those items usually helps balance out the larger item misses.

The answer to that question depends heavily on the duration and nature of your planning iterations.

If you're doing quarterly planning, the difference between half a day and a couple a days is meaningless, and there's not really any point in distinguishing among them.

If you're doing 1-week sprints, the difference between half a day and a couple days is enormous, and the product planner might get some value out of distinguishing among them.

If you're following a more kanban-y approach, the difference is perhaps meaningful, but not particularly actionable, so I think I (personally) still wouldn't bother to capture the distinction for planning purposes.

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