The Mountain Goat Software Blog

As a measure of the amount of work completed in an iteration, velocity works extremely well when teams are relatively stable.

Decide whether shared story point baselines help or hurt across teams.

A common criticism of story points is that the meaning of a story point will differ among teams.

Use release burndown charts to see progress and scope together.

Recognize helpful behavior that strengthens collaboration and trust.

Estimate backlog items at the right time and level of detail.

Write user stories for backend systems where users are less obvious.

Keep backlog detail just enough and just in time.

One measure we may want to include in our suite of metrics could be the responsiveness of the development organization.

I don't use story points for sprint planning because story points are a useful long-term measure. They are not useful in the short-term.

While I want teams to come to agreement, I don't care how heartfelt the agreement is.

When we estimate it is important that we not mix knowledge-before-the-fact with knowledge-after-the-fact.

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