Rick Tonoli

Tag: estimation

  • Accuracy and Precision

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    Rick Tonoli
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    Today I got asked what I thought was the difference between accuracy and precision as it pertains to relative estimation, I wasn’t ready for the question though and it’s been sitting on my mind bugging me so here are my thoughts: I would think accuracy would be how close the estimation was to the truth…

  • Velocity for the layman

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    Rick Tonoli
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    WARNING:This is a brain dump of an idea I’ve been playing around with, some confusion may occur! As a ScrumMaster I often struggle to explain the concept of velocity to people, a critical concept to grasp to understand how to report on progress and capability. I often get these questions thrown at me: How many features…

  • When will we be finished?

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    Rick Tonoli
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    I’m a firm believer that all work should have an agreed end date, but end dates are always a bone of contention and cause endless confusion and wasted arguments and disagreements. These usually hover around the “when will we be finished?” question and, more to the point, no properly defined (empirical) way of working it…

  • Change is good

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    Rick Tonoli
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    I’m often amazed at the number of dogmatic “prophets” out there when it comes to the latest fad’s of agile development. I myself am about getting productive and like to take the best of ALL worlds; change is not only inevitable but necessary, even changing of a process BUT, only if the change leads to…

  • Affinity Estimation

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    Rick Tonoli
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    “Affinity Estimating is a technique many teams use to quickly and easily estimate (in Story Points) a large number of user stories. This is a great technique if you’re just starting a project and have a backlog that hasn’t been estimated yet.” I remember this topic came up during the ScrumMaster course and I found…

  • Epiphany…

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    Rick Tonoli
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    Epiphany: a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience. I’ve always struggled with accepting the concept of estimating using story points and NOT effort hours. I could never get my mind around the concept and yes, I’ve…

  • Scrum in a Nutshell

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    Rick Tonoli
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    I found a nice, concise, description of SCRUM here: Scrum – a knol by Dan R Greening I found particularly interesting the first comment made that clarified my questions regarding the fundamental difference of the feature/story point estimation vs the task/hours estimation techniques. It appears that the reason is pretty much around the comfort of…

  • First Sprint Planning…

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    Rick Tonoli
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    Today was interesting… we did our first sprint planning meeting with a team of 5 people. After I’d sat with the designated Product Owner (a BA with a passion for the project) and created what I think is a sufficient product backlog,  I explained the concepts of Scrum to the team (especially around estimation and…