TL;DR
The last time we presented the scheduled game, Schedule Chicken. Today we present the schedule game 90% Done. The post is based on a remarkable book written by Johanna Rothman, Manage It!
The Pattern
You will recognize this game when we think that we have done 90% of the work, but actually, we have 90% of the work to do. Technical people are bad at estimating. First, we are too optimistic about the time needed for certain tasks. Another reason would be that we will project an incompetent image if we need too much time. We are also bad at breaking the main task into subtasks that will take one day to finish. We usually forget some of the subtasks. For example, we need a task for setting up a local development environment. If there is no readme.md file in the root of the git project indicates that we will need much more time to finish that task. Or when this readme.md is not up to date. The biggest mistake is that we do not reflect on our original estimates to learn from our failures.
How To Play
Project team members must learn how to create inch-pebbles tasks. Help them by asking five W questions about the main task.
Teach your team members how to make their status visible. Basically, they just need at the end of the day to mark tasks that are done or explain why they did not finish a task.
Do a retrospective on project member original estimates at the end of the iteration.
To make inch-pebbles tasks more easily, you should develop by feature in iterations.
Comments are closed.