Story Estimation

We were having a chat internally at Bitnami with respect: should we try to standardise T-Shirt sizes across the team and also if we ought to have a mapping between user story points and implementation hours.

I felt that this is a discussion that keeps repeating, in conversations internally and externally, and I thought it would be worth it to put some effort into summarising my thoughts about it.

Story Points vs Task Hours

Normally you will find Scrum coaches recommending the use of T-Shirt or Points for Story sizing, and hours for estimating Tasks. Stories are the unit of product/user value that it is delivered (tasks are just work).

Story sizing (T-Shirt or Points) is not an estimation of time, rather a way to express complexity. Yes, there is a correlation between complexity, effort and hours. However, Complexity tends to be less variable across team members than hours.

A Story is complex due to the problems to be solved while implementing it, but the time it takes to solve the same problem might vary depending on the skills and experience of the person solving it.

OK, but how do we established consistency in estimating complexity? Human beings are pretty good at comparing similar problems. Problem A is similar to Problem B. So, I normally start by getting a team to agree the sizes of stories/problems that they have completed/solved together in the past. Then use that as reference point going forward. This common understanding can only be shared by people in the same squad, since it is required a shared experience.

Story sizing can be and it is used to measure velocity, and also burn down progress. However, IMHO they are most useful to identify misalignment (Foo thinks is XXL but Bar thinks is L, how come? maybe Bar has some context that is missing Foo? or the other way around?). This conversation between team members about complexity is where the real value of Story sizing resides.

I think we can all agree that we can not predict the future. Hence estimating in hours is always highly inaccurate. Inaccuracy grows as you extend the period of time you are estimating over (i.e. something that can take months or it is months away).

So why is it OK to estimate tasks in hours? Because tasks are small break down of stories that are assigned to an individual to implement. Basically, the estimation is done over the shortest time span possible and taking the skills and experience of that person into account.

Tracking and managing cost

A different (and valuable) problem to solve is tracking the cost of implementing a feature/product/release for financial reasons. Most of us work on either For Profit or Cost Driven (non-for-profit) organisations, so having a record and an indication of where money (and hence hours) are going can be critical for our organisations.

While estimating time is highly inaccurate, tracking actual time spent on tasks doesn’t have to be. Clearly there is a (human) cost associated on the granularity of this tracking. Which is the right level of tracking will be highly dependent on your business and accounting model.

Going Agile: 2 Weeks On The Life Of a Scrum Team

The Ubuntu Certification team is fully distributed and has now been running Scrum for over 9 months. The team has members in Canada&US, Europe and Asia. I have been blogging about several parts of our scrum experience, now is time to piece it all together!

We run in 2 week iteration cycles within a larger 6 month release cadence. Here is what those two weeks look like:

Day1 (Thursday)- Planning session

We run the planning session (30 minutes) just after the previous iteration Demo session – No room to breath! The reason for doing this is just down to timezone and trying to get as many people as possible into this sessions.

We host the planning session in Mumble, and we review the backlog for the next iteration. We found it a bit dull just for the Product Owner to explain what each story was about. Instead, we ensure that everyones participation by agreeing the definition of done for the stories. This eliminates any misunderstandings of what needs to be deliver and ensure that everyone is paying attention.

Just after the planning session, the scrum team gets together to flesh out the task-board for the iteration. At this point the stories are re-size via IRC planning poker: At the count of three by the Scrum Master every one pastes a t-shirt size on the IRC channel.

Following the poker planning, the team discusses possible implementations and they write down tasks in the IRC channel, to be later translated by the Scrum Master into the backlog. Continue reading “Going Agile: 2 Weeks On The Life Of a Scrum Team” →

Going Agile: Don’t Forget About The Future!

(this blog has been reproduce from goingagile.org)

When working with Agile, make sure to define your long term strategy that gives direction to your product backlog.

The Ubuntu Certification programme follows the beat of the 6 monthly release cadence. In the certification team we run a two week iteration cadence. It is a continuous delivery machine! The danger is for your ambitions to get stuck in the quick rhythm.

Regardless if I am working with a product or a service team, I found it important to set a clear vision to aim for. The constant cadence of Agile is normally riddle with changes in priorities. While this enables the team to remain flexible, I have found that can be confusing for the individual: “Tell me again why are we doing this?”

Continue reading “Going Agile: Don’t Forget About The Future!” →

Going Agile: Poker Planning In Action

The Certification team at Canonical has been Going Agile now for the last 9 months. Oneiric is the first release that we are running full Scrum practices. We are a bit unique as we are spread all over the world. We have 2 people in Montreal (Canada), 1 person in Boston (USA) , 1 person in Raleigh (USA), 3 scatter over the United Kingdom, our Scrum Master is in Germany, and our latest team member is in Taipei (Taiwan). Running Scrum in this type of environment needs constant innovation. I am keeping track of our progress in my blog at victorpalau.net/tag/scrum/

Roughly every three months, we get together somewhere in the world. We just got back from the Ubuntu Rally in Dublin, where we decided to give our backlog some love!

We largely build our backlog at the Ubuntu Developer Summits and then we continue to add and remove items as we go.

Halfway through the project and with over 100 items to complete before the end of October, we needed to step back and make sure that we were working on the right priorities and that nothing had fallen trough the cracks. What better way to do this than a full poker planning session. Here is how it worked:

We use real cards that I brought over from home
We clear up a round table big enough to fit the whole team and we booked an hour and a half for the session.
We had a house dealer: I chair the session, I did not participate on the poker, my computer was the only one allowed at the table.
Using the list view in our google docs backlog, we reviewed a blueprint at the time
We spent less than 90 seconds per use case.
We use the following t-shirt sizes as measure of effort required to complete a use case: S,M,L & XL
Where there was substantial disagreement on size, we asked the highest and lowest bid to briefly reason their decision. If needed, we did another sizing round after that.

We did came out of the session with a better sized backlog. The biggest benefit for me was that we merged, deleted and added new stories based on what we had learned over the last few months of implementation.

I also had to make some tough choices based on the new information and I decided to removes some blueprints from our Oneiric backlog scope.

Going Agile: Late Night Poker and Uncertainty

After the Ubuntu Summit in Budapest, We were faced with a lengthy backlog for the next 6 months. We made sure that we wouldn’t waste too much time on defining in great detail stories that would not be executed until 3 or 4 months from now. The result is that the next month worth of stories are smaller and more granular and large stories are found towards the bottom of the backlog. So far so good.

Like any successful team 😉 we have more work that we wish we could do than we can actually fit over the next 6 months. To reduce scope, I needed to at least defined what is our estimated capacity for the 6 months and compare it with the current backlog.

To be accurate, we would need to estimate the size of every story in the backlog, in a more consistent manner than asking a team member for their gut-feeling (current process). We discussed having a Late Night Poker session at Budapest where we would size every single story, however this strike me as not agile at all.

Having discarded the massive Poker Planning session, I started looking with the Scrum Master at other options: Monthly Poker, Next Iteration Poker…and so on.

Eventually, I decided that I was looking in the wrong direction. We are going to continue doing planning poker for the Iteration that we are about to start and we will need to leave with the uncertainty of our backlog.

One thing was certain, that our backlog was too large and needed trimming down. Looking at our team’s velocity, I noticed that it was not only consistent on the story points but also fairly consistent on the number of stories completed per iteration. Saying this, I set out to cut down the backlog assuming that we completed 7 stories per iteration and that the last iteration should be empty. Clearly, this is not 100% accurate, maybe not even 80%, but it is a good starting point.

Agile is about managing change and living with uncertainty, and I’ve realised that I was trying to bend that in to good-old false security feeling of predictability.

Going Agile: The 6-Months Cadence

I have commented several times on the 2-weekly cadence that we follow at the certification team, but I haven’t gone into much detail on our 6 monthly cycle. We have just completed the Natty cycle (normally release date + 2/3 weeks) and we are about to start our Oneiric one.

6 monthly cycles help to plan achieving longer goals that drive the user stories implemented by the team in each iteration/sprint. During Natty, we had a loose coupling between these two. I regularly (once a month) reviewed the progress of the Natty backlog and made sure that nothing was falling through the cracks. Despite the good completion rate in Natty, it was more of a case of the user stories forming the Blueprints (6 monthly requirements) than the other way around.

For Oneiric, the certification team went into UDS-O with much better defined blueprints. This has not only resulted in better sessions, but also on well defined backlog. Clearly, there is no much point trying to tight down what we will be doing in 4/5 months, so user stories towards the end of the cycle are vague and fairly large. User stories for the next 2 months are better understood and described.

We have been collecting velocity data for the last few months, so by asking the team to roughly size new stories and review the sizes for the “next_iteration+1”, I hope to be able to build a burn up/down chart over the next few weeks! I will keep you posted.

Going Agile: The Ultimate Scrum Google Doc Template

While trying to work out the best way to adopt Scrum in the Ubuntu Certification team, I didn’t want to commit to an expensive process tool. So we have end up developing overtime the ultimate Google Document SCRUM tool.

I didn’t want to spent too much time reviewing tools and shopping for better prices rather than working on embedding the process correctly in the team. We might eventually move to a hosted “funky” web 2.0 solution, but in the meantime, Google Docs is doing the job just fine.

I thought that it will be great to share our backlog template with everyone, so I have created a public template with some fake stories. Here is the breakdown on how it works: Continue reading “Going Agile: The Ultimate Scrum Google Doc Template” →

Going Agile: A few iterations under the belt

I wrote recently about the Ubuntu Hardware Certification team transition to Scrum. We have since completed a few iterations, which means that the Planning and Demo sessions are in full swing. I am also happy to say that we now have a full-time Scrum Master in the team. One of the key advantages of this is that I get to sit in the demos and ask questions “from the outside” 🙂

Because of the global distribution of my team, we have end up with back-to-back Demo/Review and Planning meetings. This is how it goes:

3pm UTC – Demo meeting (30 minutes)

The Scrum Master runs (using Mumble) through all the user stories in the backlog. Previous to the meeting, team members have posted links to their demos. We share the demos using a “virtual meeting” tool. We end up settling for Spreed, as we already had some company accounts ( but I still secretly love yuuguu!).

At the end of each demo we [product owner, scrum master and me] give our opinion on whether the user story is completed or should be carried over to the next iteration (or later). Continue reading “Going Agile: A few iterations under the belt” →

SCRUM can help you running workshops

Last week I had the chance to run Rick Spencer’s Test Sprint. In Canonical-jargon a sprint is normally a 1-week workshop around a specific topic. In this case the topic was Automated Testing, hence my team was participating in the sprint.

As this was my first sprint at Canonical, I got thinking: what would be the best way to ensure a tangible outcome after a week of locking up 10 engineers in the same room? It seemed a good idea to borrow some SCRUM practices to organise the sprint. Here is a summary of what we did:

Continue reading “SCRUM can help you running workshops” →

Going Agile: Planning for the Demo and Planning meetings

Now that we are scrumming daily and we have agreed a 2 weeks cadence, it is time to start planning for the next set of meetings: Planning, Demos (Reviews) and Retrospectives.

Scrum has four meetings or ceremonies that you must do within a iteration. Here is how they are described by the Scrum Alliance

Planning: the team meets with the product owner to choose a set of work to deliver during a sprint

Daily scrum: the team meets each day to share struggles and progress

Demo/Reviews: the team demonstrates to the product owner what it has completed during the sprint

Retrospectives: the team looks for ways to improve the product and the process.

Show me the money!

The value in Demo meetings is that you get to see what the team has done and how it brings value to your customers. However, it is not as simple as it sounds… there are two things that can make a Demo inefficient:

Lack of preparation – people scrambling for demos, you hear things such as “it used to work 2 hours ago, but it is broken now due to work for the next iteration”
Old habits (die hard) – the tendency is still to ask people “did you finish?”, and then tick the box, rather than “show me what you did?”

This is pretty challenging to do remotely, hence I have enlisted the help of technology. Continue reading “Going Agile: Planning for the Demo and Planning meetings” →