Agile Training|Scrum|Distributed Scrum|Offshore Agile|Agile Estimation|

Time 2020-12-31 02:02:51

Web Name: Agile Training|Scrum|Distributed Scrum|Offshore Agile|Agile Estimation|

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Skip to primary navigation Skip to content Skip to primary sidebarAgile Buddha : Demystifying Agile, Getting to its CoreOur goal for this blog is to demystify agile, see and experience it in simple wayOur Blog Agile BuddhaAgile Workshops and CertificationsAgile Commune Join Here!WebinarsContactAbout UsShow SearchSearch this website Hide SearchStory Points for Bugs or DefectsBy ShriKant Vashishtha Generally, a sprint backlog contains bugs as well apart from user stories. In these situations, a common question is should we assign story points to the bugs.If the team does not assign a story point value to this work, velocity will show the amount of *potential* business value the team is delivering in each sprint. This way, it becomes evident that team is going more slowly through the work than it could if legacy bugs were not there.If the team assigns points to the bug-fixing effort, the team shows its true capacity to accomplish work. This way, it shows both *potential* business value delivered and effort gone in bug fixing part.When a team gets a load of legacy bugs to fix in its backlog, it makes a lot of sense to assign the story points to the bug fixing effort.On the other hand, for bugs found in the current user story /functionality it doesn t help to assign story points to these bugs. Some of these teams fix the critical/high/medium priority bugs in order to move the story to DONE. Rest of the unresolved low priority bugs move to the Product backlog or to the next sprint based on the prioritisation from Product Owner. These bugs don t get any story points.More on Story Points and Agile EstimationThis post is a part of a blog post series on story points and agile estimation. To read rest of the posts on the subject, please navigate to All About Story Points and Agile Estimation Series. Importance of Project Management Skills for Scrum Master Role?By ShriKant Vashishtha Product development continues to remain the primary focus of Agile software development methods.While we focus on product development and in turn on product development companies, a big segment of software development eco-system, IT service companies, isn t talked about that much.People working in IT service companies can vouch for the struggle they deal with on daily basis. But their stories don t get enough attention.When it comes to software implementations, IT services companies work for a client organisation and that client organisation may have its own set of processes which may or may not align with the Agile culture.So each engagement they work with, they may have to deal with different kind of work culture and probably different processes as well.IT services companies actually work in a very volatile world and deal with lots of uncertainties, dependencies and risks on which they seem to have no control. [Read more ] about Importance of Project Management Skills for Scrum Master Role? Should We Count Story Points for Unfinished Stories?By ShriKant Vashishtha Unfinished stories is a smell and the root cause in general may lie somewhere else. Why don t we try to fix the root cause first as much as possible?This generally happens when a team practices “swim-lane Scrum”(an anti-pattern) instead of collaborative Scrum. In swim-lane Scrum, each team member individually takes the ownership of a story through the stages of the process. That results in WIP (Work in Process) equal to the number of team members, at any point of time.If an individual gathers up multiple stories, or tries doing all the tasks in the story at once, you can get the context switching that comes from having too much work in progress. All that results in even higher WIP.This higher WIP results to leakage in form of unfinished stories.Let s take an example. A team of three practices swim-lane Scrum. Each team members picks one story at a time and move that to in-progress. [Read more ] about Should We Count Story Points for Unfinished Stories? Never Map Story Points with HoursBy ShriKant Vashishtha As long as a customer trusts the team, whatever way you size or estimate or don t estimate, doesn’t really matter.But that doesn’t happen very often. Whenever a customer questions about team throughput for whatever reasons, it becomes challenging to answer it using hour-based estimation as the number of hours (capacity of a team) remains constant.Now if we move towards story point sizing (relative sizing) technique, it’s important not to map with time.Here is why: [Read more ] about Never Map Story Points with Hours How to Forecast the Number of Story Points in a Sprint?By ShriKant Vashishtha Question – Estimation in the form of anything else other than time may be helpful, but we can’t use it to answer questions about when a project shall be delivered.In our previous post, we saw that Story Point is all about the relative size of a Backlog Item (PBI) which depends on the amount of the work involved, complexity and uncertainty/risk. This relative size remains same irrespective of the person working on it. EssentiallyStory point is about relative sizing and not about relative effort.Effort for any piece of work varies from person to person. One senior guy may finish a task in an hour, while an inexperienced guy may take a full day to complete the same task.If story point has no relation with time, how do we get to know the number of story points a team should be able to forecast to accomplish?In this post, let s see how to do that.Begin with a GuessLots of Agile projects are delivered in time-and-material (T M) mode. In T M mode, when a new team doesn t have any historical data available, the sprint forecast can be done based on collaborative guess based estimate from the entire team, i.e. how many story points they may possibly deliver in the first sprint.This estimate can be a collaborative guess within a team or it can more elaborate for some teams identifying sub-tasks of the PBIs, assign hours to them and then find out if the resultant number of hours are within the team capacity or not.Remember, there is no right and wrong method as both methods will have a variance of 50% of meeting the sprint goal, i.e. there will always be a 50% chance when the team will be able to accomplish the sprint goal and vice-versa. [Read more ] about How to Forecast the Number of Story Points in a Sprint? Page 1Page 2Page 3Page 22Next Page Primary SidebarJoin Us on Agile Commune!Search Agile BuddhaSearch this websiteLike Us on Facebook!

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