Agile Estimating and Planning
About this book
Cohn treats estimation and planning as separate activities at several horizons. Story points and ideal days, planning poker, velocity, and the mathematics of buffering all get detailed treatment, as do release planning, iteration planning, and the reasons traditional estimates fail. Includes chapters on financial prioritisation, splitting user stories, and communicating plans and progress with burndown and burnup charts.
Description via Product Digest.
Topics
Related concepts
- Product Backlog refinementThe ongoing activity of breaking down and further defining Product Backlog items into smaller, more precise items. It is not an event.
- Iterative and incremental deliveryA fixed cadence, a variable scope and a usable result at the end of every cycle, together with the events that make the loop work and the reason each of them is timeboxed.
- The adaptive backlogAn ordered list of everything the work might contain, kept in value order, detailed at the top and vague at the bottom, and reordered whenever the situation changes.
- Tracking adaptive progressBurn charts, information radiators and the small set of measures that tell a sponsor where an adaptive project stands, without requiring the team to produce a parallel report.
- Estimating and sizingScrum asks that Product Backlog items carry a size, says who is responsible for it, and names no technique for arriving at one.
- Burndown, burnup and cumulative flowThe three charts teams use to track progress, what each one shows that the others hide, and why Scrum names all three without requiring any of them.
- Sprint PlanningThe event that starts a Sprint, timeboxed to a maximum of eight hours for a one-month Sprint, addressing three topics.
- Estimating techniquesAnalogous, parametric, three point and bottom up estimates differ in what they cost to produce and what confidence they can honestly carry, which is what makes one of them right for a given decision.
- Forecasting and release planningScrum prescribes no forecasting technique. What it defines is that the Sprint Goal is the commitment, and that projections come from observation.
- Adaptive estimating and velocityRelative sizing, the delivery rate it produces, and how a range for a future date is forecast from what a team has actually done.