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Agile
Estimating and Planning Quick Reference Sheet |
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Key characteristics of
Agile estimating and planning … |
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o
Focused
more on planning than on
o
Encourages change
o
Results
in plans that are easily changed |
o
Is spread
throughout the project
o
The
granularity of planning is consistent with the time horizon – close-in
activities are planned in greater detail than far-off activities |
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Agile planning is
multi-level… |
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o
Release
planning addresses the questions of scope, schedule and resources for a
project
o
Product
owner and customers / customer surrogates are active participants
o
Iteration
planning is conducted at the start of each iteration and focuses on the
tasks that are needed to implement selected features or
user stories
o
The
team’s velocity in previous iterations is used
as a basis for the amount of work allocated to the next iteration
o
Daily
planning coordinates work within a team, and allows accurate assessment
of team progress |
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Agile estimates are … |
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o
Based on
either story points or ideal time, often using
Planning Poker as an approach to developing the estimates
o
Updated
on a regular basis as new information is learned
o
Best
produced by the individuals who will be doing the work, especially
estimates for the tasks for each iteration |
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References
and Training Material |
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External Papers and
Presentations |
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o
Articles
by Mike Cohn
http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/articles_estimating) |
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Books for In-Depth
Learning |
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o
Agile Estimating and
Planning by
Mike Cohn
(http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/book/1) |
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Tool Support |
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Definition of Terms |
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o
User
story: A short description
of a system capability, that can be used for estimating the amount of
work required for implementation.
o
Story
points: Relative units of
measure for expressing the magnitude of a user story.
o
Ideal
time: The amount of time an
activity takes when stripped of all peripheral activities.
For example, the ideal time for a football game is 1 hour, even
though the elapsed time is much longer.
o
Velocity:
The number of story points a team can complete in an iteration,
based on past performance.
o
Planning
Poker: An approach for
estimating the effort to complete a user story.
Each player estimates the story individually and then compares
estimates with the rest of the team; high and low estimators justify
their estimates, and then everyone estimates again.
This is repeated until the team converges on an estimate or until
the estimates are no longer converging.
This usually occurs after two to three rounds of planning poker
activity. The name planning
poker comes from the use of a custom deck of cards with valid estimate
values (usually Fibonacci numbers so differences between values increase
with the size of the values). |
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