You are under the impression, that your Developers are often estimate work items at the upper end of the possible range. You believe that they are playing safe, creating buffers. How do you address this?
Trust and Transparency go hand in hand and the trust is the beginning of all. Overestimating is a symptom, but the root cause may be different, such as the Developers do not trust the process, or the line management, or the stakeholders. This mistrust might be rooted in the organization’s culture, a former experience, or the work item’s quality. The team might also be too junior to understand some work items’ implications fully. Or the product is suffering from technical debt, which makes estimates generally more volatile.
I would suggest collaborating with the Scrum Master to provide the team with a path to let this habit go. The issue would make an outstanding topic for the Sprint Retrospective.
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