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Agile estimation issues:
There are 2 common problems with Agile estimation
1. Analysis paralysis:
- Spending too much time attempting to develop detailed estimates
- delaying making commitments until all of information required to make decision has high level of certainty
2. Cavalier approach
- Not worrying about managing uncertainity and risk at all and just starting the project with no planning at al
- Assuming that whatever uncertainty and risk is inherent in the project will be discovered and somehow work itself out as the project suceeds
So managment of uncertainty is very important
B: Story points:
- Traditional software teams give estimates in a time format: days, weeks months
- Many agile teams, have transitioned to story points
- Story points rate the relative efford of work in a Fibinaaci-like format :
0, 0.5, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100
- Its a way to estimate the amount of work done in an agile project
Story point calculations:
- In reality, its very hard for a new agile team to start calculating story points bc they have no frame of reference to compare it to
- Product owner/Scrum master might make it easier by stationg
one story point == one man-day at work
- In grooming the product backlog, stories are estimated in story points
- A voting technique is used to estimate the level of effort associated with each story in story points
- The size of the story point will provide the product owner some info to assess the business value against the level of effort
- Project team works out the team's velocity in story point on the number of story points completed in a sprint
- You can then find out how many sprints are required =
total of high level story points /
velocity of team in story points per sprint
Estimating techniques - T-shirt sizes
- Items are split into t-shirt sizes: XS, S, M, L , XL
- The sizes can be given numerical values after the estimation is done
- Decision about the size are based on open, collaborative discussion, possibly, with the occasionally vote to break a stalemate
- T-shirt size scales also require extra efort on the part of the person coordinating the agile process.
- The T-shirt sizes need to be converted to numeracial values for the sake of tracking effort over time and charting an estimated velocity for the team
Criticism of Lean:
- Lack of consideration of human aspects
- Lack of creativity
- Promotes culture of incrementalism
- Coping with variable nature of project management
- Does not apply to every project
- Feature driven development:
If we have to deliver working software every 2 weeks or so, a high stress has to be put on developing working features as a whole. Instead of spending some months developing the architecture, then another few months developing the core, then application logic, so on.
- Planning game - Agile teams participate as a whole in project planning, as everyone will have valueable information in this part of the project. The use of games like planning poker, story points, or workshops to create a user story maps is frequent in Agile teams.
Disciplines agile delivery (DAD)
- The disciplined agile delivery process dedcision frameowkr is a people- first, learning-oriented hybrid agile approach to IT solution delivery.
- It has a risk value delivery lifecycle
* is goal-driven
* is enterprise aware, and
* is scalable
- DAD is a hybrid approach which extends Scrum with proven strategies from Agile Modelling (AM), Extreme Programming (XP), Unified Process (UP), Kanban, Lean Software Development, etc.
DAD lifecyle is more complex
1. An agile/basic version that extends the scrum construction lifecycle with proven ideas from PUP
2. An advanced/lean lifecycle
3. A lean continuous delivery lifecycle
