During a training course I ran a few weeks ago, one of the delegates made a joke about the nature of agile estimation in scrum teams resembling a "seance" whereby the team gathers around the table and stares and a number of cards expecting something unnatural to happen.
How true!!
Which gave me an idea which I tried in practice today. I sat the team around a table and put the fibonacci sequences number 1,2,3,5,8,13 and ? around the table in a circle. The product owner then read out the story and the team clarified the acceptance criteria. then the story was placed in the middle of the table and each team member put one finger on the story. Without discussion or argument the story started to move towards the number which reflected it's size.
Not only did it encourage consenus practice for the team, but it was a much quieter, faster way to estimate. We kept the stories on the table grouped against their size for comparision. In an hours session the team estimated their backlog and had some great fun!!
I'll keep that one up my sleeve in future...
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I love this! You are a mad genius :-)
ReplyDeleteThis is pretty cool, I use a similar approach but on a white board. We draw a couple of columns, numbered 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20. The PO then runs through the stories and everyone endeavors to understand the requirement. We then throw all the cards on the table and each member of the team, only talking to the PO for clarification, puts the story in the column they believe it should be in, if someone disagrees, they simply move it, no discussion. I found this to be more effective than the usual poker card method and more accurate, surprisingly...
ReplyDeleteRick - the process you are describing above is called affinity estimation and does work very well.
ReplyDeleteWhat I liked about Weegie board estimation is that I insisted each team member had a finger on the card itself - thus they have to play a part in the game.
I did notice a couple of occasions where one or two team members were "overpowered" and backed into a corner. This should be quite easy for a ScrumMaster to spot, and ask the appropriate questions of the team.
We did have an interesting situation where some stories failed to move from the centre of the table. This was down to two reasons:
a) There was a huge disparity in the teams opinion of size. Equal and opposite forces being applied. The team needed to discuss some more before replaying.
b) There was a lack of knowledge of how to estimate the story. No forces were being applied.
The product owner needed to tell us some more about the story.
In both cases the centre of the table became the '?' area - whereby the team needed to spike the story or the PO needed to go away and find out some more.
Weegie or Weegee or Oujia Board? So many different spellings...
ReplyDeleteThanks to Geoff Watts for coming up with some more catchy names:
Ethereal Estimation
Spirit Sizing
Seance Sizing