For its first session of 2016, the London Agile Discussion Group ran a pub quiz around agile and lean. The teams did pretty well and it was a close fought battle. The quiz caused a lot of interest so, due to popular demand, we’ve published a slightly cut-down version. No looking… Read More »Agile pub quiz
How to improve on a guess Guessing (aka intuition or expert judgement) is probably the most common method of estimating that we use, but also the most inaccurate. Most people fall into the trap of giving a single answer when asked for an estimate. Don’t. Instead, offer a minimum (lower bound) and… Read More »Calibration tests
Story points and velocity are probably the most well known tools for estimation in Agile environments. They are the basis for predictability with Scrum. To begin with, we should be clear on what a story point is. Most people reading this will have heard at least one definition, and probably more… Read More »Story Points & Velocity (with Planning Poker)
Introduction In 1908, a guy at Guinness found a way to measure which types of barley produced the best beer-brewing yields: he called it the “t-statistic”. However, because Guinness was paranoid about giving away trade secrets, he had to publish his ideas under the pseudonym “Student”. Although we now know… Read More »Student’s t-statistic
In my recent post, I talked about Dan Vacanti’s take on Kanban charts. Some of his beliefs mean that our legacy charts are no longer workable. So what can we use to track dates, view scatterplots, check arrival vs departure rates, etc? Vacanti’s company has built a tool called ActionableAgile… Read More »Actionable Agile Analytics
I can hear myself saying it now: “If you count up the number of work items in each column, and keep a record of each item’s start and end date, then you can create a CFD [Cumulative Flow Diagram], control chart and histogram”. Apparently I was wrong. Apparently nearly all… Read More »We’ve been doing it all wrong!
“There are too many variables to take into account … it’s impossible to know what the chance of success is.” When I started my latest venture I knew that there was a possibility that it would fail. I’d spent years working with estimates and trying to forecast timelines, but this had lots… Read More »Monte Carlo simulators
I’ve been using Trello quite a lot recently: it seems to be the tracking tool of choice for many because it is lightweight, simple to use and free. But with simplicity comes a lack of features. Unlike other systems (e.g. LeanKit and Jira), it doesn’t have metrics such as cumulative… Read More »CFD plugin for Trello
Story, Epic or even Saga, what is the difference? David Lowe’s post from last year gives a good description of each. However, in my opinion, there is not much difference. A story, epic or saga all narrate the type of user, the need of the user, and the value returned… Read More »Don’t forget to add in the conversation
Probabilistic forecasting is an alternative to an estimates based approach. Rather than asking your teams to break down a lot of work up front, and then estimate it, we can use past data generated by the team from the work they’ve already done to extrapolate a forecast of what may happen… Read More »Probabilistic Forecasting
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