Should you start with planning your sprints and then see how it fits your versions? Maybe start with versions and understand how your sprints look like? Maybe planning versions by themselves is enough? How do you start?

Decouple external planning from internal planning

External value (features your customers will enjoy) moves the organization. It is why you get paid. No one will pay for “let these kids develop for fun only”, this is why open source projects were born, for developers to write some code that may or may not be used by others. Versions are communicated out to your customers, named in a language your customers can understand “in version 1.0 we will allow our customers to upload their profile image” rather “we will integrate jQuery and develop highly scalable upload mechanism over Amazon Cloud”.

Internal value (features your organization will enjoy) keeps the organization fully operational, doing its best over time. It is usually not communicated out (your customers don’t really care if you’re using C# 4.0 or C# 3.0) and not named in customer’s lingo.

Versions are more tangible

Most of us stick to planning versions and our sprints actually look the same as our versions. We’re results oriented and we want to please our customers. Moreover, no external power is actively pushing us toward internal value.

Sometimes internal value > external value

If you’re strictly results oriented, you might produce great results but only for short, unpredictable periods. Sometimes you’ll need to delay customer’s value to handle broken “machine” in your factory. Your customers won’t like this delay, but they will understand it if you’ll offer tradeoffs and communicate “we are fixing internal machine to keep our high level of production steady”. They will prefer stable producing rather than insane, poor quality or unpredictable results.

Use Sprints to prioritize internal value with external value

Maybe you can devote 5% of the sprint to maintain your ability to produce fast? Maybe 10%? Maybe 1%? It’s really up to you to figure out what you want to push every sprint. Be careful of dismissing internal value, it’s your role to actively push for it.

How do I start?

I prefer to set some goals for my sprint first: (a) is there an internal value I want to push? (b) Are there people in my team that I want to push by leading features? (c) What is my team availability for this sprint?

With this in mind, I’m starting to plan my versions for the sprint and next one, making sure I understand perfectly what should enter the sprint and when. This is the first time I validate my plans. If the planned versions fully occupying my sprint (or even more than that), I raise a flag and trying to figure out if something can be shifted without causing damage. If not, and I have some “buffer”, it leaves me with understanding how much of my internal value I can push inside the sprint, alongside external value. This is the second time I validate my plans. Did I manage to push my goals to the sprint while producing external value? If I notice there is a big need for internal value that cannot wait, I will try to understand alternatives with our product team and supply tradeoffs.

Then, all is left is to organize when should each feature start/end and making sure external value (versions) are released on time while internal value is keep moving. Keep your head above the water, plan to last.

Sprint is a planning unit, keeping it stable during that time allows a pretended piece of mind for the developers from marketing/product ever-changing demands. So it feels anyway. We developers signed up a virtual contract with our product teams saying “we will be Agile enough to allow you to change your mind every 1-3 weeks, but don’t disturb us during that time! We want to work, not wasting our time on talks!”.

Does it make sense to you? Is this the true notion behind Agile? Would it be acceptable for a great business?

Well, it makes sense only if you think that waste is more valuable than your attention. Delaying smart decisions or cutting off bad ones after 2 weeks, 2 days or even 2 minutes is simply counterproductive. If you know that a feature selected for the sprint became a waste due to priority change, why should you move forward with it? why throwing the problem to the other side of the fence: “well, my product team should have been wiser with their priorities. We’ll do it anyway just to teach them a lesson so they won’t do it for next sprint!”

Priorities tend to change. It happens constantly. Don’t panic, be open-minded and make sure your team leaders can handle priority shift. It’s perfectly okay to say no, but make sure it’s a “reasonable no”. If you see it does make sense to move out some features and move in some others, do it with care, offer tradeoffs (“this change might mean we won’t be able to release the version on time, let’s delay it in 2 days”) and make sure motivation passes to your team. Your teammates need to realize that providing organized waste is plain dumb; they also need to trust you doing these changes with full attention, clarifying tradeoffs and setting expectations. Practice your agility!

After bashing prediction systems, claiming that measuring performance of your teammates to predict release dates or personal behavior is inherently wrong, you might deduce that I meant “measuring Actual Hours is pointless”. On the contrary my friend, I believe that tracking Actual Hours is imperative for better planning and cutting off waste.

Translate internal units (Story Points / Ideal Days) into external units (Calendar)

How can you translate a 3 Story Points or 3 Ideal Days to “it will be ready next Tuesday”? By using the actual time it took to perform a task or a feature, you could actually see a correlation between Story Points size (internal to the organization) to the total amount of actual work hours range (external as you can put it on the calendar). For example, you might notice after a few sprints that 3 Story Points (based on latest 5 features), are usually taking 23-28 actual work hours to complete. Assuming you pick a number, say 6, as the amount of “effective” work hours in a single day, such features will translate to 4-5 working days.

Story Points can be translated quickly, based on empirical knowledge, to a range of working days. This will make release dates predication much easier, assisting your Project Manager and your marketing team to communicate it within their roadmap.

Tracking your actual work hours will help you to quickly balance effort in a Sprint

You’re on the first day of the Sprint and you’ve got seven Features (/ User Stories) in your “Not Started” column. You also made sure that your teammates’ availability is updated as some have vacations and some got exams during the sprint.

How can you balance your tasks effort, in hours, between your teammates?

By looking at your actual work hours history, from the example above, you can see that a 3 Story Points feature translates into 23-28 hours of work. You can immediately add to all features worth 3 Story Points one task called “TBD” with 25 (average) hours and assign it to one of your teammates. That way, you can add a “TBD” task to each one of your features, simply by checking their Story Points -> actual work hours range.

Next, you slowly break these big TBD tasks, in each feature, into multiple smaller tasks, each with different owner and estimation, until you see that the effort is balanced between all of your teammates. When your team is mature enough, they can break down their tasks and provide their own estimation at the beginning of the sprint.

Two flows for example:

a. 3 Story Points (range: 23-28 hours) -> 1 task worth 25h for Joe -> 1 task worth 10 for Joe, 1 task worth 5 for Jim and 1 task worth 10 for Annie.

b. 2 Story Points (range: 10-18 hours) -> 1 task worth 14h for Jim -> 1 task worth 10 for Jim and 1 task worth 4 for Annie.

c. [ … until all work effort are balanced by availability and optimal ownership … ]
d. Make sure that your breakdown makes sense in terms of people availability. Make changes if needed.

Summary

Tracking your actual work hours is imperative as it (1) provides a way to translate internal work units to external work units and (2) enable fast estimation of large features. The key is to clearly explain how using internal estimation can help with these goals. Asking your teammates to remain open and honest about their actual effort (versus rough estimation) requires a lot of trust from their side. Don’t break it and don’t use it against them.

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Many teams going into Scrum, have internal debates around whether or not moving to Story Points or sticking with Ideal Days. It seems that there is a lot of personal feelings involved.

Ideal Days – what is it all about?

Just imagine a work day without any meetings, phone calls or people bothering you. It’s a full day of making things done, full day working solely on your tasks, whatever that means.

Story Points – what is it all about?

Story Points are a bit more abstract notion. It includes 3 parts: Work Effort (how much effort the work will take), Complexity (implementing known yet complex code) and Risk (3^rd party integration, POC required etc). It inherently abstracts away the “who” to allow you to consider the “what”.

Estimation is expensive

I’ve said it before – estimation is expensive. You should find ways to make your estimation faster, unless you were specifically required to execute the Feature or bringing a super detailed estimation. If it’s not the case, and you were asked for numbers to determine Product Roadmap or feasibility of features, stick to fast gut feelings, may it be private hunch or collaborative hunch.

Fibonacci size – what is it all about?

To make estimation faster, it’s easier to have smaller list of options to pick from. For example, instead of picking a size from 1-100, you should pick from a smaller numbers range, like Fibonacci: 1,2,3,5,8,13 and then go to 20, 40, 70, 100. Why the jumps? Because the bigger the estimation, the bigger likelihood of being wrong or wasting too much time discussing how wrong. So instead of arguing on whether it’s 6 working days or 7, you just pick 8 or 5, depending on the specifics (effort, complexity, risk). The purpose is to estimate fast, not to be 100% precise.

Using Anchors

Usually, the idea is to price Features (or User Stories) against other Features *like* them. “This feature is around the same effort as that feature so it will be 3 Story Points as well”. After picking a few Features as “baseline”, it’s easier to estimate faster others features against them.

Ideal Days baggage

I personally believe that Ideal Days brings too much baggage into the discussion (making estimation slower):

1. Who’s Ideal Day? How long is one Ideal Day? Each member will consider her/his Ideal Day. Instead of focusing on fast estimation, everyone passing in their head “well, Joe is new in the team, it will take it twice as much! Let’s price it as twice as much then”. Story Points “don’t care” who is implementing the Feature. This is exactly how it should be done as you never really know who will actually be the implementor until you start working on it.

2. Ideal Days are not strongly correlated with estimating Complexity and Risks: People have in mind, when using Ideal Days, mostly effort involved. Story Points, due to its abstraction level, allows better focus on Complexity and Risk.

Matter of flavor, I guess

Anyway, I feel that it’s not really important whether you’re using Story Points on Ideal Days, as long as you (1) remember to price Complexity and Risk as well; as long as (2) you understand that estimation is expensive. I feel that Story Points offer better abstraction which allows faster estimation, but it’s really matter of “whatever works”.

Write down Estimation Reasoning!

Make sure you keep your estimation reason. “We said its 5 Story Points because it’s ~3 Story Points for effort and ~1-2 for Complexity and Risk. We felt good enough with 5 Story Points.” Why? If you would like to use this estimation as an anchor in the future, while trying to estimate a new feature, you should remember what the original 5 Story Points meant for you: “Was it 5 Story Points only because of effort?”

With a given time window and people, how much can you pull off?

Many managers are requested to offer a plan. Knowing how much you can actually deliver is one of the toughest question managers need to face with. It’s too elusive to measure it correctly, and there are many moving parts. You need to please your customers and your teammates, creating a plan to deliver external and internal value, picking wisely what is really feasible.

I tried to come up with a few tips to make this process a bit more structured, making it less elusive, less daunting and less “we’ll see as we go”:

1. Pick by External Priority – what will make your customers happy? Make sure you have the right priority from product / business teams and give it high consideration in your planning. At the end of the day, you are here to provide value to your customers.

2. Pick by Internal Priority – making sure you are building confidence as part of your Sprint. You want to excel over time, you must devote the time to allow it.

3. Pick by Features Size – try to see how many features of each size you can deliver in a Sprint. For example, after 2-3 Sprints, you might notice that you’re usually able to do X big features, Y medium features and Z small features. Usually there is a connection between feature size and QA effort or deployment effort, thus making this size estimation very useful.

4. Pick by Velocity – if you know you’re able to complete X Story Points (or Ideal Days) every sprint, based on your last 2-3 Sprints, use this information to pick Features to fit this number give or take. I always believe that you should aim for ~120%, to allow positive pressure which encourages self-improvement ideas, but don’t aim for failure or naïve success. There is nothing to gain there.

5. Pick by Personal Growth – you might pick some features to allow inner growth in your team. For example, you might notice a need to strengthen one of your teammate’s leadership skills by allowing her/him to lead bigger features. It doesn’t mean you should act naively; organization needs is more important than personal whims, but the organization will never actively push toward personal growth as a goal. It’s up to you to make time for it.

Many times when picking Features as execution unit, it’s hard to fit a big Feature into Sprint. This always cause the feeling of Features is too big as an execution units, leading some organization to prefer User Stories over Features, wrongfully neglecting Features over time. User Stories as execution unit are not the optimal way to go as they don’t provide enough value by themselves – you need to have “enough” Story Points to release a valuable version to your customers. They are also too abstract to understand the big picture, missing the overall why behind them. I believe that Feature broken into Tasks is a better approach and better execution unit. Obviously, there are multiple approaches to deal with big Features. You should pick the right tool according to requirements and people involved.

Breaking Big Feature, some options:

1. Extract design from execution: You can complete the design of a big Feature in Sprint 1 and implement it on Sprint 2. This way, instead of having a very big design effort and implementation effort on the same Sprint, you can use the first Sprint to understand effort and risks and use the second sprint to implement and deliver the goods, after understanding ROI better.

2. Extract framework from client: User Stories, just like Scrum in a way, introduce too many “Do’s and Don’ts”. For example, it’s considered a “bad practice” to have Technical User Stories. I believe that if the framework has specific needs (raised by the Feature) and it’s easy to break it out from the Feature itself (user behavior), it’s perfectly okay. It’s actually another step in the right way to build confidence as part of your Sprint!

3. Break big value to multiple smaller values (*caution*): Features, by nature, bring a value to your customers. It is possible though, to break the value into multiple Features, each carries only part of the value, without damaging the overall behavior. Instead of creating a “Search Engine” feature, it’s perfectly fine to define “People Search” and “Articles Search” as different features, each bringing different value. It’s even better to define sub Features inside “People Search” to enrich user experience over time, according to feedback by your customers. Caution: you need to do it carefully, sometimes breaking a Feature into multiple Features is silly as each doesn’t bring enough value by itself, until all of the pieces come together. Still, this is a powerful question to use: “Can we deliver real value to our customers by breaking this into multiple parts?”.

Most of the time, your Features should be small enough to fit a Sprint. It’s that simple – if the features are usually estimated in 2 weeks, don’t have a 1 week sprint. That being said, you should have the right (or at least some) tools to handle big Features. If it wasn’t obvious so far, don’t be afraid to “twist and mix Agile”. You owe it to yourself to understand why you’re doing things and adjust it if needed, even if it’s written in some book that it’s a “bad practice”. It might be bad for them, but it might be perfectly fine for you.