Comments on: Ditching planning poker

By: Tom

Tom — Fri, 27 May 2011 01:07:00 +0000

Please help me to understand. How do you know what the mean is unless you collect estimates from the group? Or are you saying all your stories are 8s?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 12 May 2011 21:34:00 +0000

I think the difference is we don’t typically involve the team so early – the analyst is also the tech lead, so we don’t really need to get everyone’s input about sizing. Instead, it’s usually just about implementation details when we review a story together.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 12 May 2011 19:17:00 +0000

One thing to highlight is that your team didn’t find that planning poker was providing value wrt estimation. The key point is your team and this particular project. I’ve used planning poker with teams and projects where it was invaluable for promoting discussion and clarifying story requirements. Like any technique – agile or not – use it when it works and adapt or drop it if it doesn’t. And if you’re looking for something to do with your planning poker cards, I can send you my address.

By: Andy Rose

Andy Rose — Thu, 12 May 2011 16:19:00 +0000

I see, so the tech lead/analysts estimate story size and break this down into the individual tasks that make up the
story. I take there is still some kind of sprint kick off meeting where this is presented to the devs for consideration?

I guess a requirement for this to work is for the the technical lead to have a good understanding of the code involved as they would be key in breaking the story down into component tasks but I suppose that is why they are the technical lead.

By: jlembke

jlembke — Thu, 12 May 2011 15:43:00 +0000

In my experience, our applications have been complex enough that it can be easy for there to be a large variance that sparks discussion. If most people throw out 5′s and one guy throws out a 40, that’s something we need to talk about, since that’s not likely to wash out in the end. Thoughts?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 12 May 2011 12:34:00 +0000

Yes – although we try not to get too worked up about it. Individual tasks might have disagreements about them, but we found that a story’s size didn’t really change at all after discussion.

By: Andy Rose

Andy Rose — Thu, 12 May 2011 09:00:00 +0000

So, just to be clear, how are estimations worked out now? Are these done by the tech lead/analysts and passed onto the dev team who will then raise concerns if they have any?

By: Jeffrey Palermo

Jeffrey Palermo — Wed, 11 May 2011 22:29:00 +0000

I also really like Capers Jones’ “Applied Software Measurement” book. It has so much industry data that it makes estimating much less subjective. It also helps to turn the estimate in functions into time based on platform used.