We got back together this morning, and had our first "Product Backlog" organization discussion. We had 60 minutes to organize, prioritize, and assign work estimates to our roughly 20 odd "backlog items". And we did it! Here's how. We first took our story cards and put them into Low/Medium/High categories. Then, we went into each category and put the cards in order of what we thought their relative importances were. There was plenty of disagreement, but using a loose 'voting' system we were able to get some order. Here's a snapshot of the board after round one.
The importance rating was next. There was quite a bit of discussion on this, should we use 1 as the most important, what scale etc. I really wanted to be able to build in spaces between the assign priorities so there would be holes for the inevitable new things to slide into. We ended up with assign all LOWS a range between 100-199, MEDIUMS 200-299 and HIGHs 300->. This leaves 0-99 for any really small things (which we don't have right now). We put the numbers beside each story, with a space of ten between each.
The next task was to try and get some time/work level estimates on each story. We ended up using "Fragmented Person Days" as our unit of measurement. These FPDs mean the amount of work you could do on a task given all the other crap you usually have to do. We also added an "A" for All or "S" for single, to signify if we thought the story would require one or multiple people to accomplish. So, for example, if there was an item which we thought would require a 1 hours discussion between 4 people it got assigned "4A". Here's how the board ended up after exactly 60 minutes.
My next step is to setup our "Scrum Dashboard". I got some BIG post-it's with 1 inch graph paper. I'm going to lay that out and post it outside my office to bug everyone!
Last thing to note - the meeting today was actually fun, yes fun. I can't believe it.
No comments:
Post a Comment