Friday, September 12, 2008

Story Points and Estimation...

It's hard enough to get the developer, analyst, customer combination to work together as an agile team if they aren't used to it. It's even harder to mature to a point where creating a backlog with properly authored stories comes naturally. (Remember that stories are supposed to be independent, negotiable, valuable, estimable/small, and testable)

What about estimation?

Estimation can be a tricky thing, but the agile community has come up with a structure called story points to simplify this and normalize the human error. I was recently involved in some good conversation in the VersionOne user community around how to sell the story point concept to others, and I found a great explanation of how poker planning contributes to this process.

Note to Ulisses Courel, I'd rather my infinity card over your coffee card any day! ; )

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