Category Archives: Release Planning

Wideband Delphi estimation

This has been a commonplace idea for many people for decades, used in Agile for estimating effort for at least one decade and only talked about in Agile for estimating Business Value for a few years. See Wikipedia’s article here. See James Grenning’s article here.

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Question: Re Estimating with Story Points…

Dolores asks: Hi Joe – …I have always been taught that story points should never be compared to time measurements. However, we were using 1 story point = a day or a day and a half of work to estimate initial team velocity. One of the questions we often get about scrum is how do points […]

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9 Key Statements about Estimating

I won’t explain them now, but here’s the summary… Estimations can be mis-used by some managers (and have been).  Watch out! Customers want some kind of estimate. (Ask for details about the kind of estimate they want.) There is a trade-off between the time it takes to estimate and relative accuracy.  Keep it shorter (usually) […]

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Can the Team promise a date?

I think this is an important question. To promise? Umm.  What does a promise mean?  Can Joe Namath promise a Super Bowl victory? One song lyric is: “Promises, promises, I’m all through with promises, promises now.”  Many a song about broken promises.  One of my favorites is the Eric Clapton upbeat blues song: “Promises”.   Check […]

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Can we make a promise?

Well, can we? There are some who do ‘waterfall’ (well, to be fair, something very roughly like the waterfall that Dr. Royce defined in 1970), and some of them seem to believe that we know enough early on, and change will be small enough for the rest of the effort, that we can promise a […]

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Agile Release Planning workshop – Comments

I have many comments to add to the blog, and many topics to discuss.  Let me start with this one. Last week we had another Agile Release Planning workshop, in Montreal.  (We do one almost every week.)  The workshop is mainly about taking a real set of work (about 6 months of work for one […]

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Question: Building user stories remotely…

Question: Hi Joe! Quick question – what have you found to be the best approach for creating user stories for the team members that are participating remotely? We have a release planning meeting for a group that has three team members in Connecticut and will be dialing in for the meeting. We have GoToMeeting and […]

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Is It Really important to estimate initial velocity?

Question: “Is it really important to have a SP estimate before the first Sprint starts?” I think he means an estimate of the initial team Velocity before the first Sprint Planning Meeting. Answer: The short answer to his immediate question: Yes, it is important. Why? It makes it a tighter meeting (SPM, Part 1), and […]

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Agile Velocity | Estimating Initial Agile Velocity

Agile Velocity by Lean Agile Training Here is a method for estimating initial Agile Velocity that may work for you. I expect you to use it in the context of Agile Release Planning. (Anything useful should be credited to Jeff Sutherland; any issues should be credited to me.) First we take some assumptions or identify […]

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Question: The Basics of Agile Contracts

Melinda asks: “How can SCRUM/Agile Methods be effectively leveraged for responding to RFP/proposals for Fixed Price & Fixed Date contracts especially when the Scope (i.e., Product Backlog) is more adaptive to change? When would CRs be required, if at all? How can we help customers understand and be confident that they will receive greater value […]

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