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.
Friday, July 29, 2011
Friday, July 1, 2011
Agile Tools vs. Agile Books: The value of tools over the value of books in the agile world
By Paul Heidema
I have been working with Agile for a couple of years. At Berteig Consulting we are using Agile to run our small business. As such we try to use various tools to make our life easier. We have used CardMeeting for our cycles and tasks. I have tried using PlanningPoker for online estimation. It seems useful, but maybe our team is too small to make great use of it. I am also looking for other ways to manage the reflections and learning from each cycle.
I have received an email from David Wolrich of CardMeeting that states: “Anyways, I rely on the trickle of news from legitimate organizations like yours to let users know that CardMeeting is still around, that I am still adding features, and to generate interest; thanks again.” So maybe some of you could try it and give him a shout. Much like other free applications on the net such as Drupal and Neo Office this one could become more robust and useful.
