Danube - Accurate Story Estimation? - Comments

use velocity for more accurate release planning

MichaelJames — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 18:26:16 -0500

Anonymous wrote businesses still need to know when the software will be ready for release, at least as a beta.

Yes, they want to know that. And as the funders of our efforts, they're entitled to the best information we can give them. The good news is that Agile approaches give us the ability to measure something we didn't have before: velocity (the rate the team actually turns stories into potentially-shippable product increments). Measuring velocity empirically allows us to extrapolate from real world data instead of shooting in the dark. We also have to consider the historic rate of new requirement discovery (p.k.a. "scope creep").

One approach to this, using actual project data that's been anonymized, is described here:
http://danube.com/system/files/MacroMeasurement.pdf

By the way, both ScrumWorks Basic (the free version) and ScrumWorks Pro support this, as shown here:

http://danube.com/docs/scrumworks/pro/latest/reports.html#prodburnenhanced

Hope that helps!

--mj

Michael James
Software Process Mentor
http://www.danube.com

how to estimate release dates in this situation?

Anonymous — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 11:03:07 -0500

The blog entry makes total sense. Realistically though, businesses still need to know when the software will be ready for release, at least as a beta. There are salespeople out selling and marketers getting their promotions in gear and management wanting to know resource allocation for the next several months.

In an atmosphere where the estimates are rarely true to the effort, what is your suggestion for how the team can set a realistic expectation (in advance) for a releasable product.

Accurate Story Estimation?

Dan Rawsthorne — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 23:05:14 -0600

One of the questions that we get all the time is “why can’t you estimate better?” This is a good question, but it's actually a trick question – and not the right question. What the questioner really wants to know is "why didn't your actual effort match your estimate?" Now, this is a very good question, and it has a very good answer.