I want to address a question I was sent recently and that I get asked about once a month. The question has to do with how we estimate how many hours it will take to deliver a given product backlog if we have no historical data at all. My first bit of advice is always to try to put off answering until you're able to get even one sprint of historical data. But that's not…

Continue Reading

A big part of an organization’s becoming agile is finding the appropriate balance between anticipation and adaptation, as Jim Highsmith wrote in Agile Software Development Ecosystems. The following figure shows this balance along with activities and artifacts that influence the balance. When doing up-front analysis or design, we are attempting to anticipate users’…

Continue Reading

The "iron triangle" is a long-accepted way of talking about the four parameters of project success. In the iron triangle, scope, schedule and budget each takes its place along a side of the triangle. Quality is placed in the middle under the premise that we don't mess with quality. We can, however, adjust the sides. Sometimes a product owner or key stakeholder is told, "Pick…

Continue Reading

My publisher, Addison-Wesley, has just made two chapters from Agile Estimating & Planning available for free. Check out Chapter 1, The Purpose of Planning, and Chapter 3, An Agile Approach.

Continue Reading

I live in Colorado, which boasts some of the world’s best hiking trails and North America’s greatest concentration of mountain peaks over 14,000 feet (nearly 4,300 meters). There are so many mountains over 14,000 feet high here that they are referred to simply as “fourteeners.” Most of Colorado’s fourteeners are non-technical routes; no special equipment is needed…

Continue Reading

I haven't heard the term "release backlog" in many months, but it's come up in three conversations over the past week. So, I want to share my thoughts on whether a team using an Agile project management approach should have a Release Backlog in addition to the conventional Product and Sprint (or Iteration) Backlogs.

First, let's clarify what people mean when they refer to…

Continue Reading

I was interviewed recently by Tom Cagley for the Software Process and Measurement Cast. Part 1 of the interview is available for download now. During the interview, Tom and I discuss agile estimating and planning. Part 2 will be available in early November.

Continue Reading

As a measure of the amount of work completed in an iteration, velocity works extremely well when teams are relatively stable. If the same people stay on a team, it is reasonable to assume that the amount of work they complete will be relatively constant from iteration to iteration. This allows us to plan using inferences such as "This team has an average velocity of 25 points…

Continue Reading

In the early days we promoted agile project management only for small teams because that was where it originated. We had plenty of experience to say that agile worked well on seven- to ten-person teams. We were also quick to learn the techniques that allowed agile project management methodologies to scale up to around 20-40 people. These days, though, there are many truly…

Continue Reading

I want to use this month's blog posting to introduce a type of burndown (and burnup) chart that I find useful. I've been drawing this style of burndown chart for years and have coached many of my clients to do the same. Unfortunately, we've had to draw it either by hand or in tools like Visio and OmniGraffle because the agile tool vendors haven't (to my knowledge) hit on this…

Continue Reading