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Christian Gruber — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 14:54:24 +0000

Buy amaryl without prescription, The question of "expected velocity" and long-term planning has come up at more than one client. A recent client conversation got me thinking, however, questioning how to interpret velocity when estimating and plotting a roadmap based on a current backlog of features, buy amaryl without prescription. Assume, for a moment, Generic amaryl cheap, a backlog of story-pointed features, and 10 good iterations (consistent team, no odd occurrences that would affect velocity). Mathematically average velocity (well, amaryl price, a mean really) is a 50/50 proposition for any subsequent iteration. Some organizations don't find this level of confidence acceptable. What velocity should be reported as expected for iteration/sprint planning and roadmap forecasting, and how should it be used?

Context

Interpreting velocity, before anything else, requires some context, buy amaryl without prescription. Amaryl no rx, An agile organization that sees estimates as hypothetical might find this article is of less use. In fact, a good question is whether estimation is even a value-added activity. For this post assume an organization that sees strong value in estimation and planning.

Culture

The biggest piece of context is to know the organizational culture, order amaryl on internet. This is important in two respects, and both of these cultural factors are important because they impact how Velocity is understood within the organization.

What is Failure?

First is the meaning of failure in the organization. Buy amaryl without prescription, Is failure to deliver what was committed to by the planned date considered a failure of the team, or is it simply a fact to be understood and accounted for in future planning. Buy amaryl from us, Even in Agile organizations, the former is often true and a hard habit to break. If not delivering to expectations is considered failure and has negative consequences, then that means that estimation is being treated not as estimation, overnight amaryl, but as prediction and contract. Velocity is therefore a commitment, Lowest price amaryl, and should therefore be used conservatively.

Consistency or Speed?

The second item to know is whether consistency and predictability of delivery is of a higher strategic value than the actual rate of delivery. This is often un-stated. Usually people want fast and consistent delivery, buy amaryl without prescription. The truth is that you can get consistent, or fast software development, cheap price amaryl, or a balance between the two. Lack of trust is usually a strong motivation to encourage consistency over speed, Find cheap amaryl online, or a history of quality problems, etc. In this case, as well, amaryl in uk, Velocity is more of a boundary than an indicator.

Emotional Loading in Estimation (or why not Low-ball?)

If estimation is seen as binding, contractual, Amaryl pharmacy online, or limiting, then additional emotions get overloaded. Trust, promise, drug amaryl, and betrayal are words used in such organizational cultures. Buy amaryl without prescription, Distrust is usually a strong factor, especially between silos (business vs. technology, Purchase amaryl no rx, company vs. project management vs. customer, etc.), cheap amaryl in canada. So when people are asked to give estimates, even using agile-friendly mechanisms such as story points, Cheap amaryl, there is usually a process of cementing that estimate into a part of an accountability model, so estimates start to get conservative. People are then accused of low-balling, others are accused of irrational expectations.., buy amaryl without prescription. we've all seen this. The language clearly becomes one of contention and blame, amaryl buy drug. Even the term low-balling is often an outright pejorative term for estimating too conservatively.

This doesn't happen only in agile environments, Amaryl overnight delivery, and project managers in traditional PMBOK frameworks have long factored risk into "contingency budgets". Buy amaryl without prescription, Interestingly, however, if a Project Manager were to factor risk into the task estimates, they'd be "low-balling capacity," yet if they were to factor it out and layer it on top of the project work, it's "contingency budgeting" (At least in a few experiences I've had). Either way, someone's adding a factor for uncertainty, based on the need to predict conservatively or liberally or somewhere in between.

That's the point of the article: how can Agile projects use velocity to estimate as conservatively (or liberally) as is appropriate?

An average is a 50% chance to succeed (or fail)

Velocity is not a constant, find discount amaryl. It's a set of instantaneous values on a curve, with instances being iterations. Amaryl prescription, That means that it varies, and is therefore only meaningful statistically. So how do you reasonably use velocity statistically, and improve confidence, amaryl vendors. One way is to stop delivering against "average" velocity, buy amaryl without prescription.

A lot of coaches use average velocity over the previous N iterations. This is not helpful for all sorts of reasons, Cheap amaryl no rx, if estimation is a commitment. By definition, average (well, actually a mean, amaryl buy online, but they're close) is a 50/50 proposition. If you report the average team velocity (assuming it's accurate), Buy amaryl lowest price, then about half the time the team will be under and about half the time the team will be over, statistically. Buy amaryl without prescription, So basically an average is a crap shoot, when taken in any given instance. It's can only be good in the long run. For this to work, the long-haul has to include permission to fail and a lot of trust, amaryl in us. Teams need to be able to go miss dates but will sometimes exceed dates and it should all wash out in the end. In organizations such as I'm describing, Amaryl free sample, that trust isn't there, so. Additionally, if the language of commitment is around meeting instantaneous iteration commitments (as opposed to delivering high-quality customer value as quickly as is sustain-ably possible) then you aren't playing the long-game, online pharmacy amaryl, you're playing a very short-game.

Simulate Velocity, not work

In a PMI training course I took when I was at Sun Microsystems, Order amaryl without prescription, we were nicely informed that two point estimates of tasks are a perfect way to fail half the time, per the above logic. One point estimates are just idiotic, buy amaryl without prescription. Three point estimates were better. We simulated with a monte-carlo algorithm and found a curve and a distribution, cheapest amaryl prices, and then determined a confidence level yadda yadda. Well, Amaryl cheap, we're trying to avoid wasting a lot of time estimating up-front, but one way to start representing velocity properly is to do the same kind of statistical modelling done in traditional product management, only simulate velocity, not work items.

In this approach, buy discount amaryl online, you take the last N iterations (say 10). Determine the maximum velocity (optimistic) and the minimum velocity (pessimistic), Lowest price for amaryl, and then the mode (the velocity value that seems to occur most frequently). Then you do monte-carlo simulation Buy amaryl without prescription, so you get a statistical pattern. Now, you actually can determine an answer based on confidence. If you want to be right with an 80% confidence, amaryl rx, you pick a velocity where 80% of the simulated runs were successful. (Note - there are a paucity of excel templates to do this math automatically, Buy generic amaryl, and often they are for sale. It would be nice to have a few functions with arbitrary distributions based on min-max-mode to help this along.)

It's not perfect, and it's a potentially huge amount of administrative overhead. Elsewhere I've referenced blogs that entirely oppose any estimation at all, but if you are gong to, then working statistically with simulation is the only way to take small sample numbers meaningful.

Commitment Velocity: Low-Ball as a policy.

Another approach, one perhaps controversial, but taught by some Scrum trainers is to pick the lowest historical delivered velocity, buy amaryl without prescription. This is a commitment-based approach, order amaryl overnight delivery, on the assumption that building trust around consistent delivery is critical to building sound relationships where product owners and teams can safely state their needs and get things done with a minimum of contractual behaviour. By taking the minimum, Find amaryl without prescription, you force a low-ball capacity, which means you can have high-confidence of success after a few iterations. You have, likely, amaryl pills, after a while, some spare time on your hands. Amaryl in australia, Teams can then choose to pull more work in (without adjusting their commitment velocity), work on "technical debt", improve their skills, etc, amaryl for order. Buy amaryl without prescription, A team could raise their commitment velocity in certain inflection points in the project. A new team member is added that provides a necessary skill not previously available, and after a few iterations the team is consistently hitting a higher number, Amaryl, but this is a careful process to ensure that they are committing, and if they don't make their new number, it goes down to what they got accomplished.

Indemnify teams' learning

An arguably healthier option, if you have built enough trust, is to simply indemnify a team from failing to meet the estimate. Since you're doing mathematics on actuals to generate an expected future number, everyone can acknowledge that past behaviour is no guarantee of future behaviour, and simply use it for capacity planning. In this case, estimation is actually estimation, not commitment or contract. The team is expected to be ahead sometimes, and behind sometimes. The upside of this is that a lot of extra time isn't spent playing with fictional numbers, buy amaryl without prescription. Teams are spending their efforts on delivery as quickly-yet-sustain-ably as they can, and the organization treats them as trusted professionals in this. The temptation to assume you can predict the future is seen as folly, and the estimates are used to guide overall direction, not to make outward customer commitments.

Don't be mindless

There may be other approaches, I'm sure. The agile community is certainly not short of people who love this topic and can talk for hours on "proper" estimation. The point of this post is merely to point out some options, and ask you to look at your organizational culture, team culture, customer culture, the meaning of terms like commitment, failure, success, consistency, speed, etc. Buy amaryl without prescription, As you understand the culture, balance consistency vs. speed, trust, and other factors to choose a method of estimation that meets your goals. Don't do estimation based on your own, internal cultural assumptions, as you may have developed or been taught techniques that are useful when and where they were taught, but may no longer be so. Or maybe they weren't so useful then either. Regardless, this because estimation cuts at the heart of the dialogue between producer and consumer, and establishes parameters for that discussion, it's critical that you think your choice through.

[Christian also blogs at http://www.geekinasuit.com/]

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Travis Birch — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 14:52:21 +0000

Buy skelaxin without prescription, I’m currently doing some coaching work with Regina, a new project manager working with a small team of web developers at a community development organization in Toronto. We had our first session last week. Skelaxin buy drug, Regina was having trouble getting started on a particular project and I shared with her some of the Agile methods of creating a prioritized Cycle Plan, breaking it down into small tasks, skelaxin online, Skelaxin no rx required, etc.

Regina seems to be finding Agile methods helpful in general, buy discount skelaxin, Find cheap skelaxin online, but there was a special kind of interaction that we had around removing an obstacle that was particularly interesting for me. It had to do with an email she received from Peter, a developer working on one of the websites she’s managing, cheap skelaxin tablet. Skelaxin price, Regina shared a concern that she didn’t know some of the technical terms Peter was using. So I had her read through the email and form questions around the points she wasn’t clear about - i.e., “what are buttons?” and I wrote them down as she was speaking, get skelaxin. Purchase skelaxin no rx, I then suggested that she compose a reply email containing the same set of questions. Regina’s eyes opened wide and she exclaimed, “Oh yeah - that’s so obvious!” I went on to mention that another option would be to go and do some research on her own but that there were some valuable advantages in asking Peter directly, particularly in terms of team-building, that may not be as immediately apparent as asking the questions solely for the purpose of having them answered. Here are a few:

First, it’s a way forRegina to remind Peter that she does not have a technical background and that he should not assume that she is familiar with web-lingo. Second, it also reminds him that she is a different person from the last manager he was working with and subtly reinforces that it’s important that they get to know each other as two individual human beings and learn to work together effectively. Third, and perhaps most importantly, it gives Peter an opportunity to help someone else on the team learn something new, and by doing so, contribute to the culture of learning on the team. Fourth, and perhaps most obviously, it promotes open lines of clear communication on the team, buy skelaxin without prescription.

(Of course, cheap price skelaxin, Drug skelaxin, if the team was colocated, which it is not, skelaxin online review, Skelaxin for order, lack of communication would be much less of an obstacle!)

Asking questions in the interest of learning makes it visible to others that you don’t know everything. For some people, this presents a dilemma. What makes it a dilemma is that asking meaningful questions is something that many people aren’t able to do well, discount skelaxin without prescription. Skelaxin without rx, The ability to ask meaningful questions is a learnable skill requiring the capabilities of truthfulness, humility and courage. Such capabilities - let’s call them moral capabilities - can themselves be developed through conscious, order skelaxin in us, Skelaxin no online prescription, focused effort.

Someone in the position of a newly hired manager, discount skelaxin online, Cost of skelaxin, or a veteran manager with a new team, who lacks these capabilities may feel that it is important to present to a team a persona of all-knowingness, order skelaxin in canada. Online pharmacy skelaxin, But, of course, buy generic skelaxin online, Cheapest skelaxin prices, this is false and the truth of one’s degree of knowledge and capability, or lack thereof, buy skelaxin no prescription required, Order no rx skelaxin, soon becomes apparent anyway. Clearly, this person needs to do some honest hard work to develop some humility, cheap skelaxin pharmacy, Cost skelaxin, but truthfulness and courage are still often major factors.

Or maybe you’re the kind of person (like Regina) who just doesn’t want to bother anyone. In this case, skelaxin drug, Cheap skelaxin no prescription, humility is not necessarily lacking, but truthfulness - and perhaps most of all courage - may need some attention. Concepts around moral capabilities deserve much more elaboration, cheap skelaxin overnight delivery, Buy skelaxin online, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll leave it at that, cheap skelaxin in canada. Skelaxin canada, To sum it up, if you are open and clear in the way you ask questions, skelaxin india, Cheap skelaxin on internet, people will tend to appreciate it and will trust you more in the end. Moreover, it can have a transformative effect on the environment of the team. When your team members realize that you are not afraid to ask questions and be truthful about your lack of knowledge in a certain area, buy no rx skelaxin, Skelaxin prices, it will encourage them to be more truthful about their own capabilities. Not to mention that most people feel good when they are able to help others. When your team members feel safe to ask for help and free to help each other, it is empowering for everyone, order skelaxin no rx. Find skelaxin, Asking meaningful questions, therefore, sale skelaxin, is an essential aspect of learning together, and nothing is a more powerful contributor to the success of an organization than a team that learns as a team.