A mature agile team intuitively knows what a story point means in terms of the relative size of a user story compared to other stories that it has sized in the past, but how does a new team that perhaps even has people who are new to agile get started with story points? As I … Continue reading Getting Started with Story Points
User Stories
User Stories
Sprint Length – Does Size Matter?
When a team that is accustomed to working on 6, 12, or 18-month long projects adopts agile practices, the prospect of planning its work every week or two is daunting. Planning the work every month might be tolerable so the team goes with four week long sprint lengths. As the team becomes more and more … Continue reading Sprint Length – Does Size Matter?
Story Points or Ideal Days?
Sizing user stories is a key part of understanding the overall effort required to create a product release. Getting started is simple: pick a baseline story and assign a number of Story Points or Ideal Days that it will take to complete the story. Next, look at other stories in the backlog and decide whether … Continue reading Story Points or Ideal Days?
Introducing Scrum to a Team
For a Scrum Master introducing agile to a team, there is a balance between implementing concepts and practices at a pace that does not overwhelm the team and demonstrating the benefits as early as possible to build momentum and support within the organization. Each situation is different, but let’s assume that an organization wants to use Scrum and there … Continue reading Introducing Scrum to a Team
Agile Reflections 