Workshop: Estimation Techniques
This post has been moved to my company blog at Growing Agile – you can read it here:
http://growingagile.co.za/2012/10/workshop-estimation-techniques/
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by Karen Greaves
Coaching teams to do better scrum 
My results from doing this session:
http://www.inevitable.co.za/2010/08/estimation-techniques/
I ran this session for a small group of agile advocates at my client site, as a test drive for offering a lunch and learn to a wider audience. It was a very interesting experience – lots of discussion about how each technique worked and how it might be used. I think this would be a great exercise to run for any team new to agile as refresher before doing estimations of real backlog items in order to help them understand which technique might work most effectively with that particular group of people.
Thanks for documenting this and providing the .pdf to make it really easy to run!
(On a distressing note, the youngest member of the group had no idea what the Starship Enterprise was. Somehow this bothers me much more than a bunch of Canadians not knowing what an elephant shrew might be)
Great to hear Ellen. It’s strange thinking back to a time when our teams used only planning poker. We pretty much use affinity based estimates exclusively now, ever since I ran this workshop. Yesterday I heard a team member explain to a new developer that it is just so much faster, and just as accurate. Hope your teams find what works for them. And yes it is pretty distressing that there are people who don’t know what the Starship enterprise is 🙂
Very nice description of your workshop. I did one very similar just a few weeks ago as a “Lunch -N- Learn.” I love the example of the App Mt. Dog – nice twist – I’ll bet its a pretty dog.
I cheat by using pictures (a picture is worth 1000 words). Here’s my dogs: http://agilecomplexificationinverter.blogspot.com/2010/11/dog-grooming-exercise.html
Thanks David. Love the pictures in you post 🙂
Awesome ! 😉 Can I steal/copy this worksop? I want to document it, put a creative commons license on it and make it further available!
Great thing
Yes you may. Everything on my blog is licensed via creative commons attribution license. So happy for you to share and redistribute, would just appreciate acknowledgement of me as the source. Thanks!
great, will do so .. 😉
Karen,
thanks for sharing a great exercise!
Just in case someone asks me: what are the units for the absolute values in exercise 3 and 4?
Exercise 3 is kilograms – the weight of the animal.
Exercise 4 is volume if I remember correctly in m3