Tag: User Stories

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Should You Re-Estimate Unfinished Stories?

As well-intentioned as teams are, it’s really hard to finish absolutely everything by the end of a sprint. A team may have grabbed eight product backlog items (typically user stories), but only finish six or seven of them. The other items are often close to done, but this isn’t horseshoes so close doesn’t count.

But what about the estimates on those unfinished product backlog items? Should they be re-estimated? And should the team get partial credit for the work they did complete? Let’s consider each of these questions, starting with partial credit.
Continue reading…

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Burger story

You can use storytelling to explain why slicing work is important. An colleague Rene de Leijer shared me the following story:

You are on holiday in the USA and driving already for hours on route 66 from the Grand Canyon to Las Vegas. Your stomach is roaring and your eyes are looking for a real American hamburger (sorry for the vegans). You see yourself eating one with both hands holding it in front of your mouth. And finally, in a small village, you see a strange burger cottage. Do you want to eat something in that weird place or keep on searching for another place to eat? But maybe that will take an extra hour. So yes you decide to stop and ease your hunger. The sign on the door says “Pull”, so you pull the door and it does not open. “Whahahaha” you hear someone laugh. You really feel weird on this and get a little but irritated, being hungry is not helping on this. You order a huge burger and the man behind the bar says “I will get you something in a minute, sir”. After 1 minute he puts a delicious piece of bread on a napkin and asks if you need some ketchup on your burger. And after my confirmation, he put some ketchup on the bread. After 3 minutes he puts an incredibly tasty burger on the bread, you really smell it and are eager to take a bite. “Sorry the burger is not finished yet” he says and my stomach is roaring all the time, while I am staring at that delicious piece of meat. 1 minute later, he puts some lettuce on top of the burger and only 2 minutes later some extra ketchup. “We are almost there sir” I hear him say. And finally, some onions and the last piece of bread are adding on top of it. “Well sir, now you can eat your burger, we have done everything in our power to give you the best burger you have ever tasted”. I pick up the burger and take a huge bite, and I spit it out, the bread is soggy, the burger cold and my hunger is vanished 🙁. How would you feel if you are this person, I think very disappointedly and he is leaving to find some other food? And do you see a comparison with our way of developing? Do you think the customer would enjoy if we deliver him every 2 minutes a small slice (top-down) of the burger 😉?

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Mike Cohn’s Most Popular Blog Posts from 2020

10. Use a Pre-Mortem to Identify Project Risks Before They Occur

9. Overcoming Four Common Problems with Retrospectives

8. Are We Really Bad at Estimating?

7. Can There Be Too Much Transparency?

6. How to Estimate Story Points with Multiple Teams

5. Time Pressure Improves Productivity & Quality…Up to a Point

4. Can a Team Vote Someone off the Team?

3. 25 Questions that Will Help You Know Your Teammates Better

2. Is the Distinction Between Outcomes and Output Overdone?

1. Are Estimates Ever Helpful to Developers?

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Agile Resources

I came across Andy Bacon his blog that lists some interesting articles and resources, you can find it here: https://andybacon.com/agile-resources/

And just in case he ever decides to take his website offline, here is a quick mirror 😉

Some Agile Basics

Agile Related Certifications

Scaling Frameworks

Retrospectives

Daily Scrum

Scrum Graphics

Checklists

User Stories

Role of Managers in Agile

DiSC Assessment (free)

Games

Metrics

Estimation, Data Driven Estimates, and Forecasting

Collaboration Tools

Happiness

Podcasts

Product Owner Resources

  • Opportunity canvas
  • Lean canvas
  • Product vision
  • Product roadmap
  • Release plan

Random Helpful Things

Technical Topics

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Story Point Estimates Are Best Thought of as Ranges

When estimating with story points, most teams use a predefined set of values that doesn’t include every possible number.

One of the questions I often get about story points is what to do if you can’t decide whether a particular product backlog item should be an 8 or a 13 (or a 3 and a 5). Part of the answer can be found by thinking about water buckets.

Suppose you have 10 liters of water you need to store. You also have an 8-liter bucket and a 13-liter bucket.

Which bucket would you store the water in?

The 13-liter bucket, right? Ten liters of water doesn’t fit in an 8-liter bucket. The water would overflow and spill out.

Extrapolating further, you’d use the 13-liter bucket for all amounts of water from 9 liters through 13 liters. Once you hit 14 liters, though, you’d once again need a bigger bucket.

And so it is with the values you choose to use when estimating stories. Think of each value as a bucket. A value bucket is used for all stories between that value and the next lower value.

Read the complet blogpost here: https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/story-point-estimates-are-best-thought-of-as-ranges