DevOps Games - XP Days 2013 Workshop

At the XP Days conference on Novemer 29. 2013 in Belgium, Jan_Sake Kruis and Remi-Armand Collaris (both Agile coaches) present a workshop called "DevOps Games".
Here we have published:

• An abstract of that session
• The presentation on SlideShare
• Aditional resources

Estimation Game (2)

The Round Trip Version

This is part 2 of 2 of a post on early estimation in Agile projects. To this end we introduce the Estimation Game. The first part of this post described the Basic Version of the Estimation Game.

In order to leverage experiences from past projects, it may be a good idea to involve not only the relative measures of “Small”, “Medium” and “Large” but to relate them to ‘round trips’ from the user to the system and back to the user. Suppose you have a user and a system with a screen on which the actor can interact with the system. A round trip then starts with a stimulus from the user, he performs some action which is input for the system. The system processes the input and returns the result to the actor. A new round trip starts when the user reacts to the result, which in turn is a new stimulus for the system.

Estimation Game (1)

Whereas Planning Poker works very well for estimating a Sprint or Release while the team is up and running, it is less useful for an early project estimate. It is hard to get a good feel for the size of a project at the beginning of a project, as the team has not established a measure yet. Moreover, early in a project we don’t have the level of information needed to do a meaningful Planning Poker session.

For estimating Use Cases or Epics in an early stage (before they are detailed) we use an aproach we call the Estimation Game. It supposes that Use Cases or Epics have been identified and have a brief description. In this post we share our experiences in applying this game. In the Estimation Game the team, users and other stakeholders cooperate to estimate the Product Backlog together.

The Estimation Game – Basic Version