I see the agile methodology as a toolkit. The bag must have all the tools that you might need, but you need to know what to use and when. Using a hammer on crinkle-cut nails isn’t going to deliver excellent stakeholder value.

One of the fundamental principles of agile is that the business is directly involved in the development process and not dictatorial. Waterfall projects often found themselves in a death march, and agile has been an excellent way to avoid this (Keith 2010).

The case against story points

I have not previously found a use for story points, while calculating velocity is important, stakeholder value is the key driver (Hannay et al. 2017)

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. (‘Principles behind the Agile Manifesto’ 2020)

Story points help to ensure that you are not taking on too much work in a given sprint.

Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done. (‘Principles behind the Agile Manifesto’ 2020)

I have always trusted developers and teams on the project to get the job done, and haven’t needed to dig deep into the agile toolbox and pull out the story points tools.

Filiatrault supports this arguament,

What teams should strive to do is build a culture where there is a good grasp on the solution, and all agree on definitions for the level of effort required to deliver each piece of functionality, task, bug fix, etc. (Filiatrault 2020)

Story points are a structure to support better estimations. I have likely been fortunate to only work with teams with good estimation skills when selecting and breaking down tasks into manageable bites. I see the benefit of the approach for less journeyed developers.

The concept of velocity to deliver an accurate estimation on when a particular feature or epic will be available is admirable, and essential on a large scale or high-risk projects.

I see significant benefits in using a logarithmic scale for story point estimation, as things get more complicated, they need to appear more daunting, and to be broken into smaller bite-sized pieces.

Envisioning

Lightweight future planning for the agile project helps prevent analysis paralysis. I find this particularly relevant for me, as this is something I feel like I suffered with in the first rapid ideation project, spending far too much time in the ideation and design phases.

I believe that if I had started with an envisioning process on my first rapid ideation session, I would have achieved a higher degree of success. I have recently begun work on envisioning for many of my upcoming work projects, capturing the target audience, key features, and a roadmap.

The envisioning process, while super lightweight compared to Rubin, 2013, it is helping me to define the initial set of sprints, and functionality that will be delivered. It is understood by the business that priorities will change and that it is more important to get a first draft of the solution operational and gather real-time feedback from the business users.

Applying this process to my first rapid ideation would have led me to spend significantly less time on the ideation, and attempt to get a functional artefact sooner.

Goals

  • Make use of the envisioning process for upcoming projects, specifically the project charter.
  • Further explore the use of story and value points to assist with the prioritization and timeline estimation for sprints.

References

  • KEITH, C. 2010. Agile Game Development with Scrum. Pearson Education.

  • HANNAY, J. E., H. C. BENESTAD and K. STRAND. 2017. ‘Benefit Points: The Best Part of the Story’. IEEE Software 34(3), 73–85.

  • ‘Principles behind the Agile Manifesto’. 2020. [online]. Available at: http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html [accessed 27 Nov 2020].

  • FILIATRAULT, Damien. 2020. ‘Using Scrum, What Is a Good Method to Calculate Story Points on the Planning? - Quora’. [online]. Available at: https://www.quora.com/Using-Scrum-what-is-a-good-method-to-calculate-Story-Points-on-the-planning [accessed 27 Nov 2020].

  • RUBIN, K.S. 2012. Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process. Pearson Education. Available at: https://books.google.com/books?id=3vGEcOfCkdwC.

  • BABB, Jeffry, Rashina HODA and Jacob NORBJERG. 2014. ‘Embedding Reflection and Learning into Agile Software Development’. IEEE Software 31(4), 51–7.