Many explanations of relative sizing in agile estimation fail to capture the mix of knowledge, skill, and effort involved in completing a task. Learning to play a song seems to capture the core ideas of estimation. With a metaphor, it is easier to come up with baselines to estimate against for your own agile sizing.

Downtime doesn’t need to mean unproductive time. It doesn’t have to be spent passively waiting for your next assignment. Instead, you can take advantage of your downtime and use it productively. If you want to maximize your downtime but don’t know where to start, focus on the three P’s: product, process, and people.

Some people believe branching and pull requests are inherently bad. True, branching done poorly can slow down a team, but advocating for avoiding branching altogether can lead you to ignore the more important goal of an agile process: rapid integration of changes. First, make sure you're considering the right metrics.