Category: estimating

The Secret To Delivering On Time

August 19, 2009 by Kelly Waters

Hi, I'm Kelly Waters, author of the popular blog, All About Agile. I've agreed with Artem to guest over here at ASD and be a regular contributor - this is my first post...

I've been doing agile development for quite a few years now, and seen many benefits. But one of the most remarkable things of all, is how so many teams can quickly get good at predicting what they can deliver, and deliver on time, even if they were hopeless at estimating before!

Planning poker - the real epiphany

March 27, 2009 by Jack Milunsky

Intro
Last week I established three good reasons to go with Story Points and why they're so popular. This week I want to talk about one more important aspect of story points and then provide tips on how to get started estimating in Story Points. I find this is a rather big challenge for teams just learning the ropes.

Lets talk
Scrum is a learning framework. It's been designed specifically with Inspect and Adapt points with a very specific purpose. Because estimating is a cross-functional team activity estimating the backlog is just another opportunity for the team to get together to discuss the task at hand, for the stakeholder or product owner to explain what is expected of the team. This discussion is a great way to build team morale, synchronize expectations and getting everyone singing to the same tune. Because Scrum projects are agile, it’s important that teams engage in discussion to ensure the team stays on the right track. And because the estimation is done in a team setting the estimate is generally more accurate as it represents a cross functional view of the task size, not just the developer view.

Planning - how we really do it in practice

March 13, 2009 by Jack Milunsky

Introduction
In this article I describe how we do sprint planning at our company with teams of about 10. I take you through a detailed account end-to-end process and cover all the major points.

The importance of planning
Planning the sprint is where it all starts and so it's really important to get this right. It's the foundation on which the next two weeks (in our case) worth of work is based, and without it the sprint falls apart. Set the team up for success by investing the time needed to come up with a well thought out plan. Trust me, it's worth it. (Read more...)