Estimation

Planning Poker is NOT about Agile Estimation!

One of the popular mechanisms to estimate story points as a team is planning poker exercise.

It’s an awesome technique but it may become a challenge for some teams. For instance, a team estimates story points separately as developers and testers. Later, they add up those points to arrive at resultant estimates.

Some teams get into endless discussions to ascertain if the estimate should have been 2 or 3, 5 or 8 or maybe 7.

It looks like, the primary goal of planning poker exercise is to arrive at the correct estimate.

But that’s not the point!

FAQ: Why Story points? Why not map story points with time? What’s the issue?

by ShriKant Vashishtha 3 Comments

As long as customer isn’t interested in throughput or customer trusts the team, whatever way you size or estimate doesn’t really matter. But that doesn’t happen very often. Whenever customer questions about team throughput, it becomes challenging to answer using hour-based estimation as time taken to complete any particular task deflates over time.

Some teams follow capacity based estimation technique where they identify the number of hours available in a team for the entire sprint duration. Based on that they pick up stories in a sprint. Again here as well, there is absolutely no way to know any change in team throughput as size for which capacity is defined isn’t defined.
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Agile for Fixed Price Contracts

by ShriKant Vashishtha 6 Comments

The basic premise of Scrum is to help in developing complex software through an incremental and iterative approach based on regular feedback. The feedback comes from sprint review as part of the Increment inspection. That may translate into adaptation in Product Backlog if needed. Agile manifesto has a key tenet around change, i.e. “Responding to change over following a plan”.

Fixed-price projects are all about fixed scope, money and time. In such a contradictory scenario, the question is, how should we accommodate continual changes in the Product Backlog?

Is it even possible to work in a fixed price Agile mode? If so, how?

This post outlines the most common challenges in executing fixed price Agile projects. It also suggests ways to handle them.

Story Point Mapping with Hours – Key Ingredient to Burnouts?

by ShriKant Vashishtha 16 Comments

This is based on a true story of a project I was involved in and that was also the first ever Agile projects I worked on. As I came from straight from waterfall background and didn’t have enough Agile experience, it made a lot of sense to us to map a story point with number of hours for obvious reasons. We mapped story point with ideal hours. Initially things went well. However after a few months, we started getting into difficult waters because of following problems:

We began to witness clashes among developers over estimations. As story point was mapped with number of hours, it directly mapped with the skill of a developer. For instance, a senior developer could finish a user-story in 2 hours. Another not-so-skilled developer or new-in-the-team developer could finish the same user-story in say 8 hours. That started causing planning meetings with clashes, disagreements and also spurts of indirect bullying from senior guys. As a result, not so experienced developers started spelling similar smaller estimates even though it caused them to work longer hours. As it was a distributed augmented team, we also started witnessing lack of trust within team because of those reasons.

Also customer didn’t see any significant change in team velocity even though productivity improved multi-fold. “YOU ARE NOT PRODUCTIVE GUYS…”
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Story Points and Man Hours – When To Use Them and Why?

by Avienaash Shiralige 4 Comments

The debate about why story points why not time goes on wherever I go for conducting coaching workshops. Hence I thought of sharing few more thoughts today.

Previously we had sizing techniques like Function Point Analysis, but it was tough to understand/implement by everyone and hence was restricted to experts ONLY. But estimation is an activity to be done by people who are going to work on it. Hence a simpler sizing technique was needed so that everyone(developers, testers) can understand and use it easily.

Story points is a very powerful sizing technique. It has various advantages as I mentioned in my earlier articles.

Story points estimation using planning poker which is based on Wideband Delphi method helps to arrive at consensus based estimates using collective intelligence – Wisdom of the Crowds.