Agile development has always included the practice of timeboxing–setting a fixed project time limit. However, timeboxing can also be used in another interesting way–timeboxing capabilities and stories rather than estimating them. Working with a client that was in an early stage of development of a medium sized (over 75 people on the project), lengthy (over 2 years) project we used the idea of timeboxing capabilities during release planning. Some of the capabilities in the backlog were reasonably well defined and others were ambiguous. There were in fact a significant number of capabilities for which the potential scope was wide and estimates ranged from x to 10x or more. Furthermore, some of these capabilities were tentatively …

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