Scrum bangalore 12 march 7 2015 - deepak gururaja - estimation and prioritization for beginners - at prowareness

1. Estimation and
Prioritization for
Beginners
Deepak T Gururaja
Sr. Agile Consultant @ SolutionsIQ
Deepak.t.g@gmail.com
in.linkedin.com/in/deepaktgururaja/
https://deepakgururaja.wordpress.com/

2. Plan
 Small exercise to understand Relative Estimation
 Share learnings
 Small exercise to understand Prioritization
 Share learnings

3. Before we begin
 Takeaways from the session
 If you are a beginner
 A brief about Estimation and Prioritization in Agile
 Relative estimation
 If you are a seasoned practitioner
 A new way to teach Estimation and Prioritization to your
teams

4. Why estimate?
 Imagine you are getting a house built
 You contact a contractor
 You explain to him the how you want your new house to
look like
 You answer any queries that he has
 Then, you ask for an __________
 PS – After you go back, you might want to search for the
#NOESTIMATES on Twitter

5. The Planetary System
exercise
 Can you arrange these planets in order of their
Increasing size?
– Mercury
– Venus
– Earth
– Mars
– Jupiter
– Saturn
– Uranus
– Neptune
– Pluto

6. How were you able to
arrange?
 Did you know their masses?
 Did you know their diameters?
 Did you know anything at all, on the size of of these
planets?
 How then, did you attempt to arrange them?

7. Estimation is agile
 Some Popular methods
 Story Pointing
 Assigning a relative size to PBI, that is relative to each other
 T-shirt Sizing
 Bucketing PBI into different buckets
 Ideal days
 The amount of time it would be take to complete the task,
IDEALLY

8. Relative Estimation
 Sizing one item relative to other
 Points to consider
 Complexity
 How much you know about the problem
 Uncertainty
 How much do you know about the solution
 Magnitude of work
 Rough order of the magnitude of the work to be accomplished

9. Estimates are….
 Estimates
 Not real
 Approximations
 Guesstimates
 Can be a starting point to a conversation
 Any thoughts on who has to estimate?

10. How to estimate
The exact number of candies in
this jar can not be determined by
looking at it, because most of the
candies are not visible. The
amount can be estimated by
presuming that the portion of the
jar that cannot be seen contains
an amount equivalent to the
amount contained in the same
volume for the portion that can be
seen.

11. Prioritization

12. The Noah’s Ark exercise
 Imagine you were to go on Noah’s Ark
 You have no idea how long you are going to be in the
waters
 Can you think of 5 items that you would like to carry
with you
 PS – Not categories, but, items that you would like to
carry

13. So, what’s your list?
 Un-cooked food
 Fuel to cook
 Water – Think about it
 Makeup?
 Clothing
 What else?
 So, what are the kind of discussions you had when you
came up with the list?

14. Prioritization
 MMF or MVP
 If a “Must Have” could not make it to the current MVP,
what options can you think of?
 Can your MVP be reduced further?
 What is the one thing you knock out from your MVP?
 Is your MVP the real “MINIMAL” set