Do Not Lose Your Face or PMs Guide to Tricky Questions: Why Use Fibonacci?

fibonacci

We are all used to just implement the well-known “best practices”, not even thinking much about the reasons they were created. Especially in Agile. We like all those rituals, as they make us fill as we are going the right direction. Just follow the rituals and you’ll be ok.fibonacci copy 4PMs/Scrum Masters usually hate all these clever questions from the sarcastic developers, as the only thing they can answer is – “It’s obvious, stupid!”.

You can’t even explain, why 🙂 I want to write several posts about the most frequent questions managers can’t answer, so you are prepared and next time your team mentions it – you brains can shine in full managerial glory. Also I will use levels of the answers complexity, so you can always adjust them to your current audience.

Continue reading Do Not Lose Your Face or PMs Guide to Tricky Questions: Why Use Fibonacci?

It seems that I hate estimations. Really?

Once (ok, let’s be honest, not just once) I was thinking, “Why not to get rid of estimations?”. I heard a lot from the developers in our company that they hate estimating. That is usually a very painful process for a project manager, too. Not only because of the process itself, but because of what happens afterwards. If you worked on more than one project, you definitely know that the estimation your team created won’t be ok for business people. They certainly know that this feature is very easy and that story can be done in a day… Or, “My colleague – he is a developer himself – thinks this can be done in a week!”. They all need hours, exact numbers and deadlines. Team wishes not to provide that.

Continue reading It seems that I hate estimations. Really?

Planning poker

Estimation is the core activity in Agile process. So making it faster and more accurate is the goal of every team. If we also can make it fun – great!

No doubt it is the one of the hardest thing – define, when your product will be shipped. So, taking into consideration all uncertainty of the estimation, planning poker proved to be the simple, but powerful estimation tool for the agile team. It was first described by James Grenning in 2002 and later popularized by Mike Cohn in the book Agile Estimating and Planning.

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