Tag Archives: Effort Estimations

Agile, Business, Development, Project Management, Software Development, Technology, Work

The Power of Collective Consensus for Story Point Effort Estimations

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Blind Concurrent Flip

The bartering of effort estimations between a team of 5 or more is really cool to witness and even further awesome to negotiate the consensus process. Not quite the process of the US Congress, but still attempting those on the periphery, extreme right or left of the bell curve of outliers to move toward the consensus. Discuss and draw near the point of consensus under which individuals discover their own need for resolution under grounds of somewhat tangible to their position of an item so complex gives one hope for a grander purpose.

A synonymous flip of the cards leading to the reveal moment is humbling when a team, after several rounds of dissonance, start into a pattern yielding the voting of a collective cohesion. Why do we start voting along a mutual agreement without the need for cohesion?

Can I Convince You to..

What if Chris Wallace facilitated a Planning Poker exercise between the two presidential candidates instead of a debate, driving consensus between the two presidential hopefuls?

Agile, Development, Technology

Microsoft’s Azure DevOps – Planning Poker Estimation Tool

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Although I’ve been a huge fan of PlanningPoker.com since 2011, my Scrum Product team consisted of more than five members, and their Free Membership allows up to 5 users. The team I was working with had just started their agile transformation and was trying out aspects of Agile / Scrum they wanted to adopt. They weren’t about to make the investment in Planning Poker for estimations quite yet, so I stumbled across an estimation tool as a free add-on to Azure DevOps.

Microsoft’s Azure DevOps solution is both a code and requirements repository in one. Requirements are managed from an Agile perspective, through a Product Backlog of user stories. The user story backlog item type contains a field called “Story Points”, or sometimes configured as “Effort”.

Ground Rules – 50k Overview

All team members select from a predetermined relative effort scale, such as Tee Shirt Sizes (XS, S, M, L, XL) or Fibonacci sequence (0, 1/2, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34…) All selections of team members are hidden until the facilitator decides to expose/flip all team selections at once. Flipping at once should help to remove natural biases, such as selecting the same value as the team tech lead’s selection. After that, there’s a team discussion to normalize the value into an agreed selection, such as the average value.

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Integration with Azure DevOps

The interesting thing about this estimation tool is you can explicitly select stories to perform the effort estimation process right from the backlog, and in turn, once the team agrees upon a value, it can be committed to the User Story in the Backlog. No jumping between user stories, updating and saving field values. All performed from the effort estimation tool.