I normally write about a new agile project management technique only after I’ve used it for a couple of years and found it successful in a couple of different contexts. In this post I want to share such a technique. It’s a statistical technique called “resampling” that I’ve become quite fond of for making predictions about future velocity, a method for measuring the rate at…
Sometimes teams write a user story for this activity such as: "As a user, I want at least 15 bugs fixed" or, "As a user, I want you to spend about 50 hours this sprint fixing bugs so that the application becomes gradually more high quality." Even a team that doesn't explicitly write such a user story will usually include a row on its taskboard to make the agile defects and…
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 backlog known as a release in addition to the conventional Product and Sprint (or Iteration) Backlogs.
First, let's clarify what people mean when…
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…
In a previous post, I wrote about how to establish a common baseline for story points across relatively large teams (a few hundred developers). In this post I want to consider whether doing so is a good idea. The need for a common baseline to story points usually arises from the reasonable desire to know how big the entire project is. To know that, we must know the size of…
A common criticism of story points is that the meaning of a story point will differ among teams. In this post I want to describe how can we establish a common definition of a story point across multiple teams within an organization.
The best way I've found to do this is to bring a broad group of individuals representing various teams together and have them estimate a dozen…
