Agile Planning and Estimating

August 17th, 2007

So myself and a fellow co-worker ( Matt Heidemann ) have been arriving to work early every morning as we both are the carpool center points for young students in our lives. Generally we are the only two in the office until stand up time and we have been exchanging good dialog on Agile Methodologies and looking at our current process. We had a good discussion the other day on difference between XP and say something like SCRUM) . One big thing we noticed was that XP is very heavy on the engineering process (pair programming, refactoring, etc), but a bit light on the estimating and planning side. Where something like SCRUM really doesn’t cover the engineering process as seems to be almost entirely focused on the estimating and planning of the work.

This lead to a discussion the following day on how to write better user stories . Getting those stories to encompass acceptance tests and furthermore getting those stories/acceptance tests turned into specifications for the code. How do you turn a process into a iteration plan, to cards on the wall, to specifications of all acceptance tests to code that makes those tests pass. It is far too easy for engineers to become undisciplined and start writing the tests after the code or for the business analysts to walk away from an iteration planning session without defining the acceptance criteria.

This morning we discussed the use of rcov , heckle and rake stats and how to apply this to some of our existing work to get an idea on the health of our process and projects. There is a lot brewing at Integrum that makes me really excited. It’s not often you can come to work everyday and love what you do and feel like you leave better at what you do than when you arrived. It happens more often than not here.

A client of ours talked about the book User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn. I really liked his book Agile Estimating and Planning but wondered if anyone had read User Stories Applied and what they thought of it. If you loved or hated it let me know. If I end up picking it up I will try to do a review for others. If you are local to Phoenix or in the area and want to talk about Agile process please drop me a line. I would love to chat.