Wish Me Luck!

Tonight I spent some time trying to prepare for a potentially-all-day meeting tomorrow with one of our Feature Teams. The goal of that meeting is to get that team using Story Points, in place of the duration-based estimates they've been using for their product backlog until now. One of the biggest challenges I face is convincing some - maybe all! - of the members of the team that there's any advantage to having size estimates instead of duration estimates. I already know that some of them believe there's no difference, which means that this whole exercise will seem like a complete waste of time to them. And, unlike some groups at work, this team isn't the type to simply take something on faith and give it a try to see where it leads. They're more inclined to want to argue every assertion as soon they hear it, with arms folded and disapproving frowns firmly affixed. Hence my "potentially-all-day" comment.

One of the more interesting aspects of this whole thing is the reason for this change. Their Product Owner has been pushing them to use size estimates, instead of durations, because duration estimates have a tendency to look like firm commitments to some. Size estimates, on the other hand, look like they're in some kind of code that only the team can understand. And even once the team establishes a sense of their own velocity - say, around 35 Story Points per Iteration - there's something about the fact that Story Points come in weird increments like 5, 8, 13 and 20, that just screams approximation! But as of right now, I'm not sure the team is buying this argument, so I'll be trying to sell them on the other advantages to Story Points, like how using them focuses you on more of the things that trip up product delivery, like complexity, unknowns, risks, and dependencies. But I suspect it's going to be a hard sell.