Gummibears

Presenters: Marko van der Puil, Willem van den Ende and Rob Westgeest
Type: Tutorial
Duration: 60 minutes
Audience: Teams/Developers looking to start estimating in storypoints. (Some) programming background required for participating in the actual estimation exercises.

Abstract

You can estimate in hours, days or any other time unit. There are also other ways to estimate a workload or schedule an iteration. This is one of them. Stories are estimated in points, by comparing relative difficulty to eachother. Call them points, or whatever you want (Gummibears). In this hands-on tutorial you will learn an effective way of estimating story effort in storypoints by doing it. During the tuturial you get to estimate a real world set of example stories.

Benefits of attending

Experience a way of estimation that goes beyond hours.
Be able to judge if this way of estimation is workable for you or not.
Be able to see others at work doing estimations, which might be interresting.
Start using it the next day at work if you want.

What will the organisers learn

We are interrested in other people's views about relative estimation and their reactions. We'd like to increase our knowledge of estimation in points and observe if it is applicable in more situations. The three organisers have differing views on the (general) aplicability of story points (we will not let that interfere with the introduction) and will use this opportunity to generate some more data points for our estimation discussion.

Session Outline

After the welcome and short introduction of the process a set of (real world) stories is presented with a short explanation of what they are about. Participants are split into teams to try and do the estimation based on relative difficulty. After we finish we compare results and discuss them. Using real world feedback data about the actual difficulty of the stories in iteration 1, we do another round of stories to see if our insights gained in the discussion are valid. We hope to wrap up with some conclusions (chicken talk).

00 - 05 Introduction and description of process of estimation by relative difficulty
05 - 30 1st Round of estimation including feedback and discussion
30 - 50 2nd round of estimation including feedback and discussion
50 - 60 Conclusions and wrap up

This will be a high-paced, high-energy session. Timing will be strictly policed.

Outputs

After the conference we'll produce the output generated by the session, the stories and their various estimations and statistics about those estimations here.

History

This session was run before on various occasions including XPNL in december 2004 and XPNL in August 2005: http://www.xpnl.org/Wiki/StoryEstimationInPoints.html.