T-Shirt Size Converter

Bridge the gap between agile relative estimates and traditional cap-ex budgeting by mapping T-Shirt sizes into hourly projections.

Core Metric

Blended Hourly Rate ($)

The average hourly billing or cost rate for the team executing this work.

Backlog Size Quantities

How many backlog items currently exist for each t-shirt size?

X-Small (XS) Items

Small (S) Items

Medium (M) Items

Large (L) Items

X-Large (XL) Items

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Guide

Relative Sizing to Budgets

Teams use T-Shirt sizes (XS through XL) exactly because they are not granular hours. A developer says "this is an XL, it's very complex", without committing to exactly 86.5 hours of work.

However, business stakeholders need to allocate corporate cap-ex budgets. This calculator allows you to apply an arbitrary average hour mapping to your team's abstract sizes to produce a working financial projection and resource baseline.

Managing Expectations

Never give a stakeholder just the solid number (e.g., $43,000).

Always provide the Budget Variance Range instead. Using the classic agile cone of uncertainty, early-stage backlog sizing is rarely accurate to the dollar. Over-estimate variance by at least +30% when requesting funding.

Frequently Asked Questions