Podcasts - Agile for Humans 005

This is a generally great podcast, and when I have time I try to go back and listen to some of the older episodes. This particular one was rough -- it was still finding its feet, and the conversation was of a kind that sort of frustrates me in the agile community. There's a lot of discussions where it seems like people are asking for a definitive when the answer is always going to be contextual, or else they're arguing with a practice that doesn't actually exist. I generally find myself on the side of if something isn't useful, then stop doing it, or experiment with doing without it; if it's valuable to you, keep doing it. There's no sense in getting upset about how other people are doing it either way.

Outside of the podcast, the estimate discussion is interesting to me because at my company, we have still not really hit our stride with the backlog grooming/refinement process, and estimation tends to be bound up in that. Our meetings tend to be a bit single-minded toward the goal of getting an estimate on stories, which is generally the final step in our process before they can be accepted into a sprint. It can be difficult to get people engaged in conversation about the deeper issues that might be lurking in the story.

The difficulty people have with the concept of an abstract story point (as represented by the ubiquitous "planning poker" game) is either one of the most interesting or the most frustrating aspects of this transition so far, depending on what kind of day it's been for me. The strong pull toward concretizing the units so that one point = one day is constant and kind of exhausting to work against.

Given that environment, people here so far have been over-invested in story points as a metric for team performance -- this was due in part I think to an early emphasis by upper management on reporting out this kind of information on a regular basis, and a year after we started using Scrum, there is still a lingering concern about teams "getting credit" when they do work.

I think we'll be doing estimates for a while.

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