Estimating Defects - Using Principled Negotiation

I’ve caught myself changing my stance on pointing defects this last month as I consider different contexts and reflect on what the real situation is in my current teams.

Previously, my general rule was that if we don’t fix it a bug in the iteration in which it’s found (which would be the best thing to do), then it needs to be estimated before being scheduled into a future iteration. If we don’t fix it now, it will be more expensive to fix later. We should recognize that cost. This will help us know when we'll be done with the release. If we have a significant amount of work to do represented in defects, I want that quantified and represented in the release burn down chart. I acknowledge that defects are hard to estimate. Their accuracy will be worse than that for stories, but I don’t see this as a significant problem. The value we get from knowing when we will be done is worth the difficulty.

Mike Cohn recommends estimating defects if you have a big backlog of them and are fixing new ones as they come in. But that 'if' is important. Don't ignore the context. A similar context was underlying my rule of pointing defects. I assumed that if you were having the discussion about whether to estimate defects, then you must have defects that weren't being fixed in the iteration in which they were found. In that case, you likely have more than a few defects in the backlog and you aren't likely to have a policy defining a systematic approach for fixing issues. You'll schedule the defects into iterations just like you schedule stories. A systematic approach, by comparison, could be knocking out all the defects in the next iteration, or knocking out a fixed number each week. In those cases, I wouldn't estimate.

It was Dan Neumann's thoughtful post that made me realize I was making too big of an assumption about the context at hand. He also helped me realize that interests matter. Principled negotiation is when you consider each party's interests, not their positions. ("Getting to Yes" is an excellent book by the way.) For this topic, the positions are whether to estimate defects, and if you do, whether to include those points in velocity and in the release burn down chart.

But the interests are more varied and may include:

INTEREST: A desire to measure "forward progress". As Cohn put it, "making visible that the team is going more slowly through the work than it could if these legacy bugs had been fixed when originally found."
CONTEXT:  Most any.
POSITION: Don't point defects. Or, do point, but don't include those points in the velocity or in the release burn down chart.

INTEREST: A desire to keep anyone from thinking that scope is increasing. A desire to keep the release burn down chart from going flat, or up, due to defects. (It’s embarrassing and requires lots of effort to answer executives' questions: “Why is scope increasing?" "Why do we have so many defects?”)
CONTEXT:  Applies to any context, but in particular when defects are not being attacked in a smooth, systematic manner.
POSITION: Don't point. Or, do point, but don't include those points in the velocity or in the release burn down chart.

INTEREST: A desire to make velocity appear unstable so that quality problems become visible.
CONTEXT:  Defects in the backlog are not being attacked smoothly (a set number per iteration).
POSITION: Don't point. Let the uneven defect fixing impact velocity.

INTEREST: A desire to make velocity appear more stable. (Similar to the case above with a rising release burn down chart, an unstable velocity makes executives ask questions that can be hard to answer.)
CONTEXT:  Since the work effort applied is generally stable each iteration but the balance between defects and stories might not be, pointing defects makes velocity more stable.
POSITION: Do point and include the points in the velocity.

INTEREST: A desire to know when we are going to be done with all the stories AND defects.
CONTEXT / POSITION 1: Defects are not being attacked in a smooth, systematic manner. This interest can be served by pointing defects and including the points in the release burn down chart and in the velocity.
CONTEXT / POSITION 2: This can also be served by not pointing AS LONG AS you are addressing issues on a steady basis (so that your velocity is stable and therefore useful in computing the release end date).
CONTEXT / POSITION 3: Another approach is to address all of the issues immediately in order to get them out of the backlog. Point them or not; doesn't matter.

See how a single interest can be served with different contexts and different positions?

INTEREST: A desire to avoid overstating velocity.
CONTEXT:  Estimating and including recently introduced defects in velocity. The excellent concern is that "the team’s anticipated velocity includes an allocation to fixing defects that are yet to be introduced" and pointed. (Dan Neumann)
POSITION: Don't point, or don't include in velocity.

INTEREST: A desire for velocity to "… represent the team’s true capacity to accomplish work." (Cohn) Or, a desire to make velocity look better than it really is. (A desire to pacify upper management that wants to see a rising velocity number. A losing game, by the way.)
CONTEXT:  Most any.
POSITION: Do point.

INTEREST: A desire to get credit for work done, which is less justifiable if it’s our own rework and more justifiable if the bug was caused by another team.
CONTEXT:  Most any, but needing to get credit signifies an illness in the organization.
POSITION: Do point.

INTEREST: A desire to avoid the need to argue about a bug report actually being a story (so that we can estimate it for whatever reason makes us want to estimate it).
CONTEXT:  Applies to most any context, but this probably signals some animosity or lack of trust between the Product Owner or QA and the rest of the Technical Staff. At best, this may just be a desire to hold to the team's aggressive commitment.
POSITION: Do point.  If you point them, then it's easier to quantify how much more you did beyond the commitment.

INTEREST: A desire for the Product Owner to weigh the cost before requesting a fix.
CONTEXT:  Most any.
POSITION: Do point. Whether to include the points in the velocity is another matter.

The pie can be expanded for each of these positions once the interests are known. One party may become aware of an illness in the organization and see a way to cure it. One of you may be able and willing to educate the executives or boldly attack the quality problem. Maybe an unstable velocity and an increasing release burn down chart should be welcomed as an opportunity to talk to those executives about agile, metrics and what-not. Agile believes that visibility is good.

Bottom line – Use principled negotiation to understand stakeholder interests and the full context. Then devise a defect handling policy that specifies when defects will be handled and whether they will be pointed. The way you use iteration and release metrics needs to be in tune with all of that.

Parting shot – A tremendous amount of effort is expended on this topic for a situation we'd rather not have in the first place.

'Tis the Season for Pair Programming

There are few things that disturb a pair programing environment more than futzing with your nose. Chewing on pens or a lanyard or one's own fingers is not cool, but runs a distant second to nose fiddling.

Luckily, 'tis the season in which many offices have so called "holiday parties". What's this have to do with pairing ettiquite? Gift exchanges. That's right. Office parties often involve Secret Santas or White Elephant / Dirty Santa gift exchanges. What a great opportunity to make a few improvements to your agile environment! Few pair programming teams have the guts to directly confront issues of social graces. So, why not conspire with others to make sure that "special someone" has lots of opportunity to draw the perfect gift, and then get stuck with it?

So here are my ideas, your shopping list, for things to gift your pair to help keep his hands away from his face.
These are truly gifts for the whole team. No, really. These are gifts the whole team should go out and purchase.

• Tissues. Tissues are more than a subtle hit. Hopefully they'll be used. Disinfectant wipes are almost in this category, though they do more to counteract the behavior than to correct it.
• Decongestant. I rub my nose a lot more when it's stuffy. That may be why your pair does it.
• Allergy medicine. Itchy eyes, itchy nose; He's gonna rub 'em.
• Fingernail clippers. What better gift than a manicure kit for one who chews his fingers? Well, here's one...
• A gift certificate to The Boardroom Salon for Men. If you don't live in Texas, there's bound to be something similar in your own town. Just... not as big... or as manly.
• Hand sanitizer. Not only is it good for rubbing on your hands, it's also something that's uncomfortable when rubbed in the nose. It's kind of like using pepper to keep a toddler from sucking her thumb.
• Gum. Altoids. Mints. Jolly Ranchers. A variety is a must. These have the added bonus of attacking bad breath. This is also the one suggestion that can keep your lanyard and pen eating pair on a more healthy diet. (Surely, sugar is a more healthy diet than a piece of plastic.) These items may also give the incessant talker something else to do with their mouth.
• A nose hair trimmer.

Some Essential Items

That's right. A nose hair trimmer. This is an essential item, right up there with dental floss and a tooth brush. Every man should have one. I think men mess with their noses more than women and I'm convinced the problem is nose hair. Notice mine in the photo. (Referring to my trimmer.) The buttons are worn off. Pssst. That's a clue for anyone working on that last minute gift idea for me.

White Elephant exchanges are supposed to be unusual and humorous.These gifts would certainly be unusual. I would find them humorous, and taken in the spirit of the event, I'm sure you will too. Most importantly, the team would find this beneficial. Guaranteed to increase your velocity 10 percent. What else can promise that? If most of your team will stick with this list, some good is bound to come of it.

My Road to Agile

For those of you without the patience to read yesterday's long post, here is the abridged version. My route to agile wasn't overnight.

Fist exposure to an automated regression test suite in '89 (with the IBM 3174 Communications Controller).
Many years of coding and laboriously testing stuff by hand.
Wanted to try my hand at management in '96.
Project managed wrongly what could have been a nice agile project.
Felt ignorant.
Started studying.
Went back to programming.
Fell into an XP project in '99.
Fell in love with XP.
Studied it.
Tried to spread it.
Practiced it on a number of projects.
Wrote about it.
Spoke about it.
Disappointed people didn't flock to it.
Wanted to try my hand at managing in an agile fashion in '05.
Did much better.
Wanted to practice it on more projects, so became a coach for hire.

The moral of the story:
Consider all that led up to you buying in. Then guide and encourage those you work with, but give people space to find their own road to agile. Have patience with those you coach.

photo credit: Tomasz Wiech

How I Got Into Agile

This is long, but there is a moral to the story.

I had been programming for several years when I became tired of supporting the PPP and Frame Relay code in IBM's first router. No, that's not it. What really drove me away was the threat of having to pick up support for LU6.2. Maybe it wasn't LU6.2. Maybe it was something else, but it was definitely SNA. That's not the direction I wanted to go in. I wanted to work on IP. Any part of IP. I'd have been happy supporting basic IP, UDP, TCP. Developing any of the routing protocols would have been great. That's where the future was going to be. SNA? Yuck.

Prognostication in the early '90s -- score one for me.

I pleaded with the manager of the IP group to take me on. He had no openings. Or he no likey me. Or I had no IP knowledge. Whatever.

My manager at the time was Tom, a great manager and a real character. Tom was often railing about how many worthless meetings we had and how many people we had in them. Tom wrote a program in those days to compute the cost of meetings. All you had to know was the salary bands for the various levels and what level each of the attendees were -- stuff most people knew. Today you can get a program that does this for your iPhone. I digress. Tom was disappointed by my desire to leave his group, but was supportive in helping me find a place where I could grow and be happy. We'll come back to Tom in a bit.

A good friend, Sam, was working in the same division on some Smalltalk apps. Cool stuff, I thought, but I didn't realize how cool. Smalltalk will never make it, I thought. "What you are doing is kind of hard to buy into", I thought. C++ is where you want to be. I later said the same thing about Java.

Prognostication in the mid '90s -- Although Smalltalk didn't make it in the market, it would have been the thing to learn. Score one for me against Smalltalk's market-share; But -1 for being against Smalltalk as an important language; -1 against Java.

Sam's manager, Joe, offered me a position and made hints toward his retiring soon. I was thinking that if I couldn't work on IP I just might as well go into management. So I joined up. Sure enough, Joe very soon retired and handed the reigns over to me.

Now back to Tom. Not one month into my new role as manager, something was found to be lacking in our software. I don't recall whether it was a bug or an enhancement request. Whatever it was, Tom needed it for his product. My former manager, Tom, was now my customer. So, wanting to be a strong manager with a backbone, one who could make the tough decisions and stand by them, protect his team and his schedule, I said no. I either said simply 'no', or I gave him a delivery date way out in the future, which might as well have been 'no'. Although Tom was the man who helped me get this job, had given me a promotion along the way, and was now my customer, and although his request was quite small, I said no. When I became a manager I threw out the window all I knew about being collaborative. I stopped practicing what I believed in as a developer. I did what I thought managers were supposed to do. Tom wasn't my only customer. I had bigger customers with big projects and big demands. Tom was furious.

What I didn't know then was that this team of Smalltalkers was quite agile. Of course, we didn't have that term back then. Gosh. This was in the midst of the ISO 9000 certification heyday. I had to document our process. I never new managers had to do that kind of stuff! "What have I gotten myself into?" I thought. I really didn't know how to describe our process. I kind of knew what we did, but document it? I knew I'd need help and thought the team would be as annoyed as I with this task. I dreaded asking the question and I didn't fully understand the answer: "Iterative and Incremental" with a few other words wrapped around it. So, I wrote down Iterative and Incremental on the process document, wrapped a few other miscellaneous made up words around it, then whipped out MS Project and got my project plan in shape. And it was a doozey! Spread out, the project plan covered a very large conference room table. I was so proud. (But it was really quite disgusting.) I could demonstrate when we'd be done (well after everyone wanted it), how I carefully put the plan together (with painstaking detail), and how many more expensive Smalltalk contractors we'd need (don't ask). I knew nothing of negotiating scope. I project managed wrongly what could have been a nice agile project.

I knew I was missing something. I felt ignorant so I started studying. I went back to programming while trying to figure out what I was missing. Steve McConnell's Rapid Development and Steve Maguire's Debugging the Development Process and Fred Brook's The Mythical Man-Month stand out as books that began to point me in the right direction.

Then in '99 I discovered jUnit and very soon after got invited onto an XP team, thanks to Greg Houston. Greg would say I resisted XP. Perhaps I did. But I soon fell in love with it after I got used to pair-programming. That took some number of months. Then I began studying XP, writing about it and tried to spread it. I was there at the start of XP Atlanta, which was led at the time by Obie Fernandez and which we later renamed Agile Atlanta. I attended XP Universe in 2001. I practiced XP on a number of projects then started speaking about it within the company, at a local user group and at a nearby college. I also submitted an experience report and a research paper to XP 2003 in Genova. I knew I'd be using agile for a very long time.

I thought I could convert people, that people would readily see the light and that in just a few short years everyone would be doing XP. They would be won over by my passion if nothing else. People would flock to our XP user group. jUnit would lead people to XP and the XP books would convert everybody. And I knew this would happen throughout the industry.

Prognostication in the early '00s -- score one for industry wide fear, uncertainty and doubt with a big helping of resistance to change.

My Prognostication Score: 2 out of 5.

After some years of being an agile developer and advocate in an organization lukewarm to the concept, I decided that I wanted to get onto a team where everyone really wanted to do XP and management supported it. And I wanted to try my hand at managing again, this time in an agile fashion. I found such a team to manage and I did much better this time (though considering how bad the first time was, this might not be saying much). This project eventually brought me to my desire to practice lean/agile on more projects, so I became a coach for hire.

So that's how I came to agile and here's the moral of the story: I think it's important to remember the route you took and how long it took. For most of you I suspect it wasn't really overnight. It might seem that way on the surface. "I got the book, read it, tried it, loved it, all overnight." Not likely. There was a road that got you prepared for the switch. Those we work with, those we try to coach, are on their own road. Have patience with them.

photo credit: Tomasz Wiech

Getting Started with Kanban - Answers for Some Mechanics

Let's assume you've read David Anderson's excellent Kanban book. You've started using Kanban on a project. Everyone notices how much more transparency there is in the process now. Some welcome that visibility. Others are not so happy about aspects of that visibility.

If you are reading this blog, you are probably not after Mechanical Agile. You are smarter than that. You want to add real value to your organization. You know that Kanban can help your team focus on flow and continuous improvement if you can figure out, in practical terms, how to use these metrics.

Let's say you've started well, with an understanding of what is important to your business and you have an improvement goal. Maybe you want to start measuring cycle time, want to have a Cumulative Flow Diagram and want to create a frequency distribution diagram or process control chart. You are getting started but the book leaves many details about how to do that as an exercise for the reader. Rightly so. You certainly wouldn't want a specific tool to be prescribed just as Kanban doesn't prescribe which improvement model to use, of which there are many: Deming, Lean, Theory of Constraints, etc.

Thinking back on some questions I had when I started using Kanban I realize many of them had nothing to do with improvement models. They were more basic. In hopes that this may help you, I provide some of the answers I've come across or come up with. I give credit for the good answers to conversations I've had with Dennis Stevens and others. The stupid answers are all mine.

After counting days blocked, do you exclude those blocked days from each item's duration?
No. What you are after with cycle time is how long on average it takes to pull something through the system. Blockage happens. It's part of the cycle. You want to know how long it will take to get an average story through the system with average blockage. You use the days blocked as another, separate metric available for analysis and improvement.

When something has been on hold for a long while and gets dumped, do you include that item in your average cycle time calculations?
Sometimes things get blocked so long that that you give up. Or should give up. Toss that effort in the trash. Forget about it. Write it off. Maybe it will come back again someday, but when it does, you might as well start over. Just dump it. Don't directly include that item in your average cycle time. I say don't "directly" include it because it has had an impact on the metrics. It took up time and effort and caused other items to be delivered later than they could have been. So that item had an impact on your cycle time even though you exclude that item from the metrics. If you were to consider the item's end date the date it got blocked and include that item in the average cycle time, this would make your cycle time look shorter than it really is. Conversely, you could skew your cycle time towards having too much buffer if you held onto the item too long and consider its end date the date you dumped it. So, no, don't include the item in your average cycle time.

Do you include weekends in your lead time calculation?
Eh, do whatever you want. If your average lead time is greater than a week and if your business thinks in terms of calendar time, include them. If your average lead time is around a week or less and if your business thinks in terms of business days, then exclude weekends. Excel has a networkingdays function you can use.

=NETWORKDAYS(B34,C34,'KanBan.xlsx'!holidays) 

For quick items that start and end on the same day, should I count it as a day or as a half a day?
If your average cycle time is much greater than a day and this happens rarely, count it as a day. It's not worth the effort to do differently. If it's rare that any item takes 2 days to finish, then consider measuring at a granularity finer than a day -- measure in hours. If your average cycle time is a couple days and this happens often enough, count it as a half-day -- measure in half-day increments.

How do I graph a frequency distribution using excel?
Use a bar chart. I put the cycle time durations I care about in a column: .5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, etc. These are the "bins" that feed the FREQUENCY formula. Name the binsRange and name the durationsRange. Next to those bins, is an array formula: select the range, type in the formula =FREQUENCY(durationsRange,binsRange), and press ctrl-shift-enter. Then I graph the bins and frequency as a bar chart as shown in the image at the top of this blog post.

How do I graph a Statistical Process Control Chart using excel?
I'm assuming you already have columns for completed date and duration. There must be a better way, but the quick and dirty approach is to add a column for the mean and upper and lower control limits and upper/lower spec limits. These columns will have the same value (the mean, or the mean plus/minus three standard deviations, or the spec limit) in all rows. Select those 5 or 7 columns: date, duration, mean, upper/lower control and upper/lower spec limit. Insert a X Y (scatter) chart. Select the mean series, right click, and Change Series Chart Type to a Line chart. Do the same for the other control lines. Voilà!


I hope this has been useful. If so, let me know.

What questions of this sort have you resolved or do you still have?

Looking Ahead

I like to pass along my thought process and habits to those I work with. (Which is good because, well, it's what I get paid to do.) For example, I'm always looking ahead to the next planning or the next estimating meeting. I teach this behavior to my clients whenever I'm coaching a new Scrum Master or Product Owner.

I start off by involving them in what I'm doing, showing what needs to be done and by explaining my thinking. The teaching is very experiential, yet incomplete in a way. If I explained everything in my head, everything I was looking out for, I'd be doing too much telling and not enough involving.

Tell me, and I will forget.
Show me, and I may remember.
Involve me, and I will understand.
- Confucius, 450 B.C.

Yet there comes a point where I'm about to push them out of the nest and let them fly solo when I become more explicit about teaching my thinking. This leads me to throw down a list of things to remember, to refer to later, always tailored to the local context. Experience tells you what to look for and this is somewhat different in each situation so please don't expect this to be an effective checklist for your organization. But in general I keep the following questions in mind.

I look at the stories that haven't been estimated as well as the next iteration or two.
Can the team estimate the story?
Can the team plan the story?
Are the descriptions good?
Are the acceptance criteria sufficient?
Is the story too big?
Does the team need to do a spike first?

How does the next iteration look?
Too many points? Not enough?
Are there un-estimated stories in there?
Are the stories prioritized?
Have we given the team some advance notice as to what we have in mind for the next Sprint?

If we have specialization or multiple teams for one backlog, should we think about which team should take each story?
Does the next iteration look balanced between the teams/specializations?

How does our release burn-down look?
How does the release backlog look?
Will we have stories ready and estimated in advance of the start of the next release?
How much lead time do we need to need?

If I'm using an online backlog management tool, am I overlooking some stories not in my standard filter because they haven't yet been slotted into an iteration or assigned to a team?

When using an online tool for backlog management, I set up views or queries to help us answer those questions:

• No Estimate
• No Team
• No Sprint
• This Sprint
• Next Sprint
• Release Plan

That's provided naturally by some tools, can be set up with a little work in other tools, and is downright impossible in others.

Looking more than one iteration ahead, are there holidays coming up that will fall on a regularly scheduled estimating or planning day (or a pre-planning/pre-estimating day)?

The Scrum Master can help keep an eye on things and point out what is lacking, but the bulk of the decision making of course belongs to the product owner.

I hope you find this useful.

photo credit: Tomasz Wiech

Standing Meetings: Estimating, Pre-Planning, Pre-Pointing

It's helpful to have standing meetings. Although they are indeed standing in the photo, in this case I'm not referring to the absence of chairs. I'm referring to regular and reoccurring.

I've found it useful to have regularly scheduled estimating meetings. For two-week sprints I hold estimating in the middle of the sprint in the same time-slot as planning. If planning is every other Monday at 10, estimating is the other every other Monday at 10. (Planning is usually longer, though. Planning usually takes one to four hours, depending on the local situation at my client. Estimating usually takes less than one to two hours, depending on how many stories we feel the need to estimate.) Being careful to not let this become waste, we don't estimate more than necessary just because we have a regular meeting.

But why the standing meeting? Why not just estimate whenever needed? The scheduled meeting disrupts the team less than an impromptu meeting. This is because the team knows it's coming and they plan their day around it. This also affords a bit of discipline that even mature teams can benefit from. It forces the product owner to always be ready to estimate and to always have something ready for planning.

This brings me to pre-planning and pre-pointing meetings. I schedule a standing meeting to occur a couple days before each planning day and each estimating day. For newer Product Owners, this is time for the Product Owner to work with the Scrum Master or Agile Coach (me) to be sure the PO is ready. We don't want to come unprepared and waste everyone's time. Many Product Owners continue to use this time in this way even after our engagement is over. When useful, we pull other team members into our prep to help define acceptance criteria or to split stories.

Regular or Impromptu? What do you do?

Approaches to Retrospectives

I had the distinct pleasure of working briefly with Tim Wingfield a few months ago. Bright guy. We were talking recently about different retrospective approaches. One of his teams was in a rut with how their retrospectives were going. They tend to only be the griping and airing of grievances style and they weren't getting actionable items. Everyone was caught up in the complaints.

The great thing about agile is that you can be agile in order keep from getting into a rut. Each new client has a different situation which gives me opportunity to focus on a one aspect of agile more heavily than at another client. I get to try different nuances each time.

The neat thing about retrospectives is how applicable they are and how easy they are to apply outside of IT. Today I was sharing some of my approaches with a cycling friend whose realty group, Dillard & Company, uses a genuine team approach. I say genuine because they are a team in the real sense of the word. They aren't just a group or loose federation that incorrectly calls themselves a team.

Anyway, I had these approaches in my head and Tim had commented that my retrospective artifact was a little different than what he had seen described in writing so I thought I'd put them down in a blog post.

I tend to use a flip chart for the retrospective when I have a dedicated space in which I can leave a big visible chart. Unfortunately, my clients often lack sufficient space. So I find that I most often end up using a white board and then transcribing the retrospective notes into some tool like VersionOne or into a wiki. I like using the whiteboard during the retrospective, but I don't like hiding the results online.

When I use a flip chart, I find it convenient to draw quadrants. When I use a whiteboard, I just do columns.

Either way, in these quadrants or columns I often write:

• what went well
• what did not go well
• do more of
• do less of

Sometimes I use:

• good
• bad
• do differently

Less often I use SaMoLo:

• Same As
• More Of
• Less Of

I may use "opportunities" instead of "bad" or "did not go well". It depends on the tone of or presence of animosity in the team and whether certain terms are emotionally charged.

There are times when I really want to dig into things and fully understand what's going on. I facilitate the whole discussion. I often start out with "so, what happened this iteration?" Or, "what went well?" Or, "how did it go?" I try to record the essence of what people say. Be a good facilitator. Elicit input from the quiet ones. Try to cover each of the areas at least a little. I may dot-vote for the one or two issues to attack in the next iteration, if consensus isn’t obvious. This approach can take a while. I use this approach the first few times with a client or when we have largish iterations. If people get impatient, I don't use this approach.

Once I'm through that stage I like to switch to this other approach. I have everyone come up to the whiteboard all at once and write whatever they want in any of the columns. I request that they briefly tell someone in the room about what they just wrote. I listen in for themes or things I want to dig into during the discussion that I have once everyone is done writing. I often don't write anything of my own, but I may if I see something important missing. This gets us through the kudos and complaints more quickly so that I can get on to the "do differently" items and find some specific action item to take away. I have gotten a lot of positive feedback on this approach. Everyone feels more engaged. It gets them out of their chairs and their blood pumping.

Another approach is to ask people to write their thoughts on sticky notes. You can then read them or have them read them. You can have the team do an affinity grouping of them. I'm not sure how to keep that approach from dragging on too long, but I can see how it can help elicit input from the quiet ones.

One other thing I like to do before I run a retrospective is skim over what we recorded in prior retros. If I find an issue that was brought up over and over but that never made it into an action item, I’ll just start the retrospective with that and figure out how to solve it.

Other than in that instance, I never exclude the opportunity for people to complain about something. It's important to have a release valve, an opportunity to blow off some steam. But we don't have to dwell on it. Some things you are just not going to solve and other times just mentioning an issue can solve it.

I mix it up because it's important to do retrospectives in different ways. Regardless of how I run it, I always look for one specific, measurable, achievable, actionable action item as an outcome of the process and I make sure it has an owner.

Of course, Esther Derby's Agile Retrospectives book is a great resource for more ideas.

Sticking With It

In the prior century I made several failed attempts to read the whole Bible. I usually quit because I found the language tedious to read and hard to understand. (That, and a lack of spiritual maturity.) I had tried the King James and the New International versions. I finally bought a study Bible, one of those with lots of footnotes, in a modern translation. Since I was having so much trouble with the wording and reading, I picked a translation that was easy to read, a dynamic equivalence translation -- NLT. It took three years to make it all the way through, but it was very rewarding.

I'm now attempting a read-the-Bible-in-a-year program in a different translation. This time I picked a balanced translation, Holman, backed up by a number of formal equivalence translations, chiefly NKJV and NASB.

There are many different approaches to reading plans. I picked a chronological plan, which I thought would be neat. And it is at least a little neat. I'm hoping that reading the whole thing in a more compressed time frame and chronologically will give me another perspective on the whole thing. Less time will have elapsed from one book to another.

This time around, though, I find the reading much less enjoyable than the 3 year deep study approach. It's a lot more reading and a lot less studying. I would recommend the reading through in a year approach to someone only after they have done it the other way.

Question

What has helped you stick with it and read the whole thing?

My Approach to Estimating

I did some research on using function point counting on an XP project many years ago. A few people remember that paper and occasionally I'll be asked what approach I recommend these days for estimating. There is a lot to like about function point counting and it can be useful on an agile project for estimating a whole project (but not an iteration for reasons explained in the paper).

Story Points and Planning Poker

The best approach for estimating user stories on an agile project is planning poker cards, small stories, estimating regularly, and keeping a small set of good (well estimated) stories visible. What I mean by keeping some standard stories visible is having a BVC (or just story cards left up on the wall somewhere) for those stories that went well, that everyone agrees it was a good 1 pointer or 3 pointer. "How does this story compare to that one?" is a common refrain.

Estimating regularly (weekly or at least every other week) keeps the approach and the "standards" fresh on everyone's mind. Have a regularly scheduled (standing) meeting on the calendar.

I don't get any more complicated than that. That's good enough. It's quick and requires little special skill. Well, estimating with points and planning poker is a skill that does need to be learned, but it doesn't necessitate a class, a thick set of rules, or a software estimating tool of any kind. Sure, a class or some reading can help, but it's not necessary.

Bootstrapping

For bootstrapping an estimating process for a new team or a new project, I like Steve Bockman’s Team Estimation Game or the less formal approach I used on a project in the early 2000's which amounts to little more than collaborative sorting of story cards into simlarly sized piles. James Grenning describes another version of a similar activity.

Question

On a related topic, tell me, do you have only the developers participate in estimating or does QA participate too?