Milena Mastrasso

Software estimation is the ghost of the process, always is difficult to estimate how much time it will cost, you can do it in different ways, with different techniques, by intuition, by the quantity of code lines or story points, by experience of someone or because you compare the project with other projects.

In the last meeting of agiles@bsas we were talking about software estimation in agile projects, we were discussing some different techniques. One of them is known as Planning Poker and I found it very interesting and let me explain why.

Starting the Estimation Process

To start the process someone tell what are a user story about, then all the people think which is the cost of this story and tell to the others. Up to this point all be right excepting for something that I take notice after some projects: the first person who say which is his estimation influence the decision of the others.

Imagine that instead of saying which is the estimation of each member you write it in a peace of paper and facedown and then all the papers turn over, no one knows what is written in the other papers, so there is no influence.

Planning Poker

The planning poker is a funny way to do the paper games but using a deck of card like this one:

You can notice that there aren’t all the numbers. This is because the objective is that estimation is not accurate, so each card must be bigger enough  than the previous.

So, after the user story explanation, each member put his card face down, and all together turn over. If there are lot of differences between  the estimations they discuss his opinions and re-estimate. If there are agreement the estimation is over.

Some considerations

• If a user story needs one hundred card it means that is too big or is incompressible, so the client or the Product Owner must divide it to decrease the complexity.
• When someone put a zero card it means that this task is already done or should take no more than a few minutes of work.
• The cup means that the team member is tired to think and need a break.
• The question mark card means “I have no idea”. If this card is used too often, the team needs to discuss the stories more and try to achieve better knowledge spread within the team.

I want to share with you my first experience at Agiles@Argentina, this is a little (but growing) group of people that enjoy sharing their knowledge about agile practices and how they apply this on daily work.  In my last post I talked about this meetings.

Last time we were talking about “What do you do in your first iteration?” and I would like to present some of the models proposed in that talk.

Some of the participants announced that they were using Scrum. However, I found an interesting difference, all of them talked about short Sprints, but the duration of this Sprint various between one and four weeks depending on the speaker.

Another speaker announced that their projects always start with a Retrospective meeting where the team discuss about “Which are the objectives for the project?” and “What could and could not be done taking into the experience of past projects?”

I also note that almost always the project initiate with a pre-sales process where they can take the “big picture” of the client requirements and then they formally start the project delivering in the first iteration a piece of final product which is made of:

1. Architecture document
2. Product Backlog and User Stories
3. Iteration Planning

Now I invite you to tell me and all the readers what do you do in your first iteration? what do you deliver? and How do you estimate what shall you do in each iteration?

If you want to share or learn something about agile estimation this is the topic of the next meeting (Tuesday July 14) at Microsoft Argentina offices, you can register here.

I recently found a group called Agiles@Argentina, this is a yahoo group which discuss about agile software development methodologies and organize meetings to share our knowledge in different parts of Argentina.

Particularly in Buenos Aires, the meetings are scheduled the 2nd Tuesday of each month in Microsoft Argentina offices. This time they will discuss some related topics like:

• How to initiate projects
• What do you do in fist iteration?
• What do you deliver at this time?
• How do you estimate?
• What are your decisions?
• What are the activities you do at first time?

They use Lightning Talks, 3 slides in a slot of 7 seven minutes to share what you do and what you think.

I invite you to visit and join this group to take notice about the places where are organizing other meeting, some agile training courses.

See you!