Articles
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The Case for #NoEstimates The #NoEstimates movement isn't really about no estimates. It’s about working in a sufficiently agile way that you don’t need estimates. When you break down your work into smaller chunks, you provide more value by delivering working product than you do by estimating. What would it take for you to work that way? |
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How Do Your Estimates Provide Value? If you are agile, you might spend some time estimating. If you’re using Scrum, you estimate what you can do in an iteration so you can meet your “commitment.” But estimation is a problem for many agile projects. The larger the effort, the more difficult it is to estimate. You can’t depend on ideal days. Do your estimates provide value? To whom? |
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Planning Feature Velocity by Understanding Team Behavior When planning releases, it’s important to understand where team effort is being spent. By using high and low watermarks, a project manager can determine a suitable approach to take when setting expectations and determining whether it is necessary to alter team behavior to focus more on getting those features into a release. |
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Making Sense of #NoEstimates A couple of years ago, the Twitter hashtag #NoEstimates appeared. Its purpose was to start a discussion about alternatives to estimations, but the idea of a project without explicit estimates is odd to most people in software development. However, if you start exploring it, you may find better sources of information to rely on. |
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'Tis the Season for Annual Planning: How to Have a Jollier Experience This Year One of the primary goals of annual planning is to translate aspirational strategic plans into realistic execution plans. Sadly, rather than delivering plans we can all feel good about and believe in, too often it leaves us depressed about the work ahead of us. This article shares five practical principles to remove the emotions associated with annual planning. |
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Need to Learn More about the Work You’re Doing? Spike It! How do you estimate work you've never done before? One proven method is to spike it: Timebox a little work, do some research—just enough to know how long it will take to finish the rest of the work—and then you can estimate the rest of the work. You don’t waste time, you can explore different avenues of how best to complete the task, and your team learns together. |
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How Visualization Boards Can Benefit Your Team While many teams can use help structuring their conversations, some teams also need some way to know whether the structured conversations that have taken place have provided sufficient information. Kent McDonald explains how using visualization boards can help in these situations. |
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Agile Development and Software Metrics Dan Horvath explores useful metrics that utilize function point analysis (FPA) that you can apply to agile projects. Dan shows how to measure productivity and quality as well as how to estimate for agile projects. |
Dan Horvath
January 9, 2013 |
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Estimating the Unknown: Dates or Budgets, Part 5 In many ways, estimating project budgets or dates for agile projects turns out to be irrelevant. If you have a ranked backlog, and you finish features, you can always stop the project if you hit a particular date or cost. |
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Helping the Customer Stick to the Purpose of a User Story Lisa Crispin writes that you need to understand the purpose of a user story or feature. Start with the "why." You can worry later about the "how." The customers get to decide on the business value to be delivered. They generally aren't qualified to dictate the technical implementation of that functionality. It's up to the technical team to decide the best way to deliver the desired feature through the software. |
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