Project Manager: "So that's the feature we need you to add... T-shirt size?"
Me: "Depends what shop I go to, sometimes L, sometimes XL-"
Project Manager: "No, no. T-shirt size... Estimate. Small means hours, Medium means days, Large means weeks."
Me: "Oh... 4 hours."
Wtf.

@Bitwise I know, silly 😂
Annoying because as Devs we translate all our tech speak, but they cba to translate "Management Speak"

T-shirt sizing is relatively common and far from stupid. Human suck at estimating time, but are OK at estimating relative complexity

@willol i don't see how it's easier to say '3 M sized T-Shirts' compared to '3 days'...

@nikola1402 I think it's even more general than that, like you just say either "Small", "Medium" or "Large" if it's hours, days or weeks respectively. But either way, it's still totally pointless 😂

@pda87 it does make a bit more sense when you put it that way, but still...how did they come up with T-shirt thing ? :D there are a lot of better analogies

@nikola1402 because nobody's able to correctly estimate in term of time. You say 3 days, in reality it could very possibly take you 5. And when estimating high level feature in a several months project, using time is just suicide.

What people can do thought, is estimate if a feature is more or less complex than another feature. That's what T-shirt sizing is about.

And "3 M-sized " does not exist, it's either S, M or L, that's the whole point.

@willol now that it's explained properly it makes a lot more sense :) i honestly thought that it was some kind of weird management technique. I still have an issue with the T-shirt thing, but it's completely different problem

@Bitwise I've heard about 3 people say it while I've been sat at my desk. I really don't understand why they can't just say "what is the estimate?".

So, XL is months, XXL is years and XXXL is decades?

@aaxa Your extrapolation sounds correct to me. Although even "XXXL T shirt" doesn't correspond to a length of time in which I would embrace this silly analogy.