The Significance of Story points

Expecting your teams to estimate in Story Points can be quite a leap of faith. When I first introduced the concept of Story Points at my previous company, no-one could wrap their heads around the concept. When it comes to estimating, we’re so accustomed to thinking in days or hours that making the leap to some obscure, seemingly illogical measurement is quite the expectation – especially a bunch of engineers.

Getting used to it
Once you start using Story Points, it usually only takes a couple of sprints before teams start to understand the magic in this new practice. Many companies I talk to, who have adopted Agile, generally practice a modified Scrum/XP process. Many do not estimate in story points and from my point of view, this is a big mistake. In my opinion, Story Points are the fuel for the Agile machine. If you get the Story Point estimation working well, the rest of the Agile/Scrum process is a breeze.

So what makes Story point estimation so important, so good…

Planning - How We Really Do It In Practice

Introduction
In this article I describe how we do sprint planning at our company with teams of about 10. I take you through a detailed account end-to-end process and cover all the major points.

The importance of planning
Planning the sprint is where it all starts and so it's really important to get this right. It's the foundation on which the next two weeks (in our case) worth of work is based, and without it the sprint falls apart. Set the team up for success by investing the time needed to come up with a well thought out plan. Trust me, it's worth it.

Phoenix Scrum User Group

Last night Rich and I gave a talk on Agile best practices to the Phoenix Scrum User Group. The talk covered all aspects of our process, including setting the Scrum and XP dials to eleven. We talked about how we were able to build Agilebuddy from start to finish in just under six months and how we were able to start using Agilebuddy to track our own progress from the 3rd week of development. This sort of thing was almost unheard of a couple years ago.

Additionally we talked about Lean, and how that is starting to make an impact on Software development teams around the world and how we take advantage of some of the lean philosophies of minimizing work-in-progress. Rich finished off with an overview of Test Driven Development in the Rails environment including recommendations on how to start and what to watch out for. At the end, there was a short demo on Agilebuddy. Overall, the presentation was well received.

Back from Railsconf - so refreshing

So last week I got to spend the better part of the week in Vegas. I am not much of a gambler but I will say, I love the vibe in Vegas and the food and entertainment are always good.

Railsconf is so refreshing. Everyone is there to learn and I am quite certain everyone left there with an enriched experience knowing more than when you got there and with a greater rolodex of likeminded colleagues.

What's truly amazing to see is a room filled to capacity with Rails developers (1200 or so) all on their macbooks, all connected and twittering in real time. This would make a great backdrop for the Twitter site, indeed,  this could replace the friendly ol whale graphic we have come to know (and not necessary hate) so well. Actually that's what is so cool about the Rails community. It's all about being open and honest, sharing and giving back. So if there is a bug in your software, it's ok to share that with the world, just tell them when it's going to be fixed and everyone carries on in their merry ways.