Practicing agile theory

Here I discuss the curious case of mixing story points and person days and using them synonymously, not understanding what a monumental difference it is, in terms of arriving at a schedule using the two. While the team is using T-Shirt sizing (or planning poker) to come up with a backlog size in Story Points, they are using the words "Story Points" and "Person Days" interchangeably. As a prologue to my previous post https://practicing-agile.blogspot.com/2019/08/when-you-equate-story-points-with-time.html - the objective in this one is to find the answer to the question -  "How does a backlog estimate in terms of Story Points translate to how long will it take for the team to deliver the backlog, given that requirements, technology and a lot of various other factors influencing estimates are bound to change?" In other words, if the backlog size is 120 Story Points, its equivalent to saying that the backlog is worth 120 PDs of work! A derivatio...

Agile becomes fragile! When you are "doing" agile (most likely because it's in vogue) but have not come out of the "sequential " SDLC execution syndrome or the traditional waterfall way of thinking and executing a project, you are most likely headed for a disaster! Of many things that may or will go wrong, is the estimation of work . The traditional methods of estimation like function-point analysis helped us answer the question - "how long (or duration) will a piece of work take to complete?". On the contrary, Agile keeps it simple and takes a minimalistic approach to estimation. In my opinion, estimation in agile is no rocket science as long as you are clear with the basics and understand "what story points are" and how to use them. Visit my blog post on story points for an understanding. Story Points vs. Time (Person Days) Mike Cohn shares a mantra that makes estimation easy - " Estimate size, measure velocity, derive ...

I n my earlier post , I discussed about self-organization/spontaneous order as a process, its trigger and the result of self-organization. In this process of self-organization, I also mentioned about "collective animal behavior" and the emergent properties of groups formed as an outcome of this behavior.   In this post, I go further to discuss about the formation of this group of animals and what's so special about it in a "non-homosapien" context. Allelomimesis: The act of any groups of animals swarming together in unison appearing as one m ulti-individual creature is a behavioral process known as ' allelomimesis '. The flight pattern emerging out of self-organization has multi-fold advantages for birds: The most obvious being that since each bird is slightly behind the next, all the birds can see the lead bird, and the bird immediately in front and to the side, allowing them to coordinate their flight paths and not cr...

I start this blogpost with a visual illustration of what I had seen and captured in my "then new" Nikon D750 (Full Frame) , as an excellent real-life example of self-organization. Picture credit: "Lightnlens Fotographie" by Jasdev Singh| Web: www.lightnlens.net Self-organization , also called spontaneous order (in the social sciences ), is a process -  where some form of "overall order " arises from local interactions between parts of an "initially disordered " system . The process is spontaneous , NOT needing control by any external agent.  Trigger for self-organization: It's often triggered by random fluctuations , amplified by positive feedback . The resulting organization is wholly decentralized and distributed over all the components of the system. Such an organization is typically robust and is able to survive or self-repair substantial perturbation.    “Collective animal behavior ” is a form ...