Inflectra | Part 2

Understanding the Planning Board for Backlog Refinement

September 13, 2021

This is Part 2 of the larger paper on Good Agile Product Backlog by Dr. Sriram Rajagopalan, Enterprise Agile Evangelist, Inflectra.

Introduction

Our earlier blog about demystifying a good agile product backlog emphasizes how a good product backlog promotes stakeholder alignment. Emerging from the lean principles of attenuating waste and amplifying learning, Agile promotes a holistic view of the solution rather than just the technical system. So, any tool that incorporates backlog management should promote transparency of the backlog as well as committed items.

Sriram Rajagopalan Part 2

The Perils of Agile Estimation (Part 2)

June 7, 2021

In the previous post, we examined why and how agile software estimation goes wrong so often, and we identified three principles that must support any good estimation method:

Reliability - An estimate must reflect the performed work within a reasonable confidence interval.
Objectivity - The same estimate should be given for a task, regardless of who's giving the estimate.
Consistency - Given nothing else has changed, an estimate should not change with time.

I call this the ROC principles. In this post, we'll start looking at techniques and methods we can apply to our estimation process to implement these principles. In order to properly ROC-ify our estimates, the first thing we need to grok is the difference between complex and complicated tasks.

The Perils of Agile Estimation Part 2 Fred Heath