The document outlines the principles and methods of agile planning and estimation, emphasizing the importance of planning levels and the agile lifecycle. It discusses various estimating techniques, including relative and absolute estimating, and introduces the concept of story points to assess size and complexity. Additionally, it provides practical examples of user story estimation and the use of complexity buckets for categorizing work.

1. 2p ÷ 0.5e = 4x
simply said:
double productivity in half effort
That’s Agile..

2. Topic: Agile Planning and Estimation
Agenda:
 Importance of Planning and Planning Levels
 Bird’s Eye view of The Agile Lifecycle and Agile Team
 Agile Planning and Estimating Principles
 Levels of Agile Requirements, Estimating and Sizing Units
 Estimation Methods and How to Size points
 Complexity Bucket method
 Sample and Examples

3. Agile Planning
“When preparing for battle, I
find that Plans are useless, but
planning is indispensable”
- Dwight D. Eisenhower

4. 6 Planning Levels
The Team is Involved in Planning Steps 4,5,6

5. The Agile Lifecycle

6. AgileTeam

7. Agile Planning & Estimating Principles

8. Level of Agile Requirements

9. Estimating
“It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.”
—John Maynard Keynes
Relative vs Absolute Estimating
 Relative Estimating
 focuses on size and complexity - this happens at the story level
 Absolute Estimating
 focuses on ideal time - this happens at the task level

10. Sizing Units
 Story Points
 A measure of the relative size and complexity of the story
 How much effort and how hard is this story compared to
others on our backlog ?
 Avoids the need (and waste) behind precise estimates
 Ideal Time
How long will it take if
 It’s all you work on
 No one interrupts you
 And everything you need is available

11. The ‘Right Method’ for the ‘Right Time’

12. How to Size Points ?

13. Estimating Story Points using Complexity Buckets (Elatta Method)

14. Sample of User Story Estimation table
 Work Categorization
 Categorization can be based on specific needs e.g. Design, Development, Testing, Documentation
or it could be User Interface, Business Logic, Database, Integration, Testing etc.
 Keep the Categorization limited to 3 or 4 categories max for speedy calculation
 For each category use scale of Light L=1, Medium M=2, High H=3, Complex C=4
 Bucket Rounding is to round it to the nearest Fibonacci Bucket number (shown in previous slide)
Story ID Summary
Work Categorization Total
d
=a+b+c
Bucket
Rounding
e
Story
Points
=d+e
Design
a
Development
b
Testing
c
1 Story Xyz L => 1 M => 2 L => 1 4 -1 3
2 Story Abc (has multiple
external integrations)
L => 2 M => 2 L => 3 7 +1 8
3 Story Def (minor/cosmetic
change)
0 M => 1 L => 1 2 0 2

15. Sample Release Planning Wall

16. Example Backlog

17. References
 Mike Cohn’s video on Agile Estimating (available on youtube)
 Sally Elatta’s video on Agile Estimating and Planning (available on youtube)

18. Let’s get started..
Manish Agrawal
eManish@gmail.com
eManish