By Paul Goddard
During a recent training course I ran, one of the delegates made a joke about the nature of agile estimation in Scrum teams resembling a "séance"; whereby the team gathers around the table and stares at a number of user story cards expecting something unnatural to happen. How true! This gave me an idea for a different type of iterative estimation that I tried in practice with ‘Team Woodstock’. I sat the team around a table and wrote the Fibonacci sequence’s numbers “1,2,3,5,8,13” and a “?” on post-its around the table in the design of a Ouija board. Once everyone was sitting comfortably, had cleared their minds and entered a trance-like state the product owner read out the story and the team clarified the acceptance criteria. Then the story was placed in the middle of the table and each team member put one finger on the story – in silence. Without discussion or argument the story started to move towards the number which reflected its size, by the act of the team members pushing or pulling the story towards their chosen number.
