Steve Neiderhauser

One Benefit of Story Points

On Scrum projects I've had people come up to me and say, "I have no idea what's happening on a project unless I can see hours."  My response to that is you can't tell how the team is performing with hours.  Is the team more productive when they work 60 hours a week?  30 hours a week?

Story points (relative estimate of effort) show you the improvement of the team… Story points show the velocity and how much a team completed in a sprint.

Here's a story point chart of a team I coached. By using Scrum and Extreme Programming, the team increased its velocity by 391%.

 

The Case Against Agile

Steve Denning lists ten management objections to Agile software development.

I've found his second objection to be one of the biggest barriers to Agile.  "Agile doesn't fit our organizational culture."

Because Agile is self-organizing and projects are managed by three groups — product owner, Scrum team, and Scrum Master, functional managers are no longer needed to manage projects. This creates conflict and is often one of the reasons Agile has a hard time succeeding in an organization.

Right Amount of Planning

With each passing day it becomes easier to model or build software.

And yet, many managers find it difficult to let go of their obsession with planning. It's not that we need to throw away all planning, just that it should align with the new realities of software development.

Seth Godin makes the case — When execution gets cheaper, so should planning.