Let's Scrum

JUST IN TIME ESTIMATIONS Estimating User Stories using Story Points is a very popular method used by agile teams to estimate the User Stories based on size and complexity and it perfectly suits the agile teams. Does Story Points help teams to know how much time would they need to complete a particular User Story or a Task? I know most of you would say NO. Then what helps the team to forecast their work completion schedule? We Shall come back to this in a bit. If Story points doesn’t help teams to estimate their tasks, then why do we need story point estimations? Any guesses? Would you believe if I say the story points are just a gateway for considering the User Story for the sprint planning. Yes, Story Points act as a parameter for understanding the complexity of a User Story to determine if it can be completed within a Sprint. I keep hearing frequently that some agile teams have the practice of converting the User story Points into hours say 1 Story point is equivalent t

  Do you think your team does a lot of context switching?  Do you still find the dearth of collaboration among team members? In your scrum ceremonies, do you still hear more “I” s than “We” s? Is your team failing to meet their Team objectives frequently? Are your Team members still worried about their respective tasks only, based on their personal preference or assigned to them? Is your daily scrum just a status update meeting rather than an opportunity to discuss a common vision? These are some of the common problems that a Scrum team encounters.  Mostly we interpret the reasons behind the above problems to be lack of coordination among the team members.  But have you ever tried thinking for the reasons beyond the coordination issues in the team? Have you ever retrospected to understand if there would have been something in common for the team to work that would have solved the above problems.  Yes, you were right. The team might not have an obvious reason to work