Theme Scoring

You can use theme scoring to compare user stories or entire projects against one another. In this technique you identify a set of criteria that will be important in prioritizing. Each item is assessed on a relative 1-5 scale against each criterion and the priorities are determined.

Theme Screening

Like theme scoring and relative weighting, this technique can be used to prioritize user stories or projects against one another. The simplest of the three prioritization techniques, theme screening starts with you identifying a baseline item. Each other item to be prioritized is compared to the baseline item for a set of factors that will determine priorities.

I’ve wanted to make some of these available for a long time so it’s nice to finally be able to do so. The first two tools we’re making available are a velocity range calculator and a relative weighting worksheet.

Velocity Range Calculator

The velocity range calculator takes as inputs at least five recent sprints and then tells you the range which corresponds to a 90% confidence interval around your velocity. Plans created with this 90% confidence interval will be more likely to be accurate than plans created with a point estimate of velocity. This technique is described in Succeeding with Agile.

Relative Weighting Worksheet

The second tool is a relative weighting worksheet. Relative weighting is a prioritization technique that can be used for items on your product backlog (or for comparing entire projects). I teach this technique in Certified Scrum Product Owner classes and wrote about it in Agile Estimating and Planning.

More to Come

You can find the tools in the new tools section of the Mountain Goat Software website.

I’ll have more tools to announce in about a week.

Attendees at our courses have always been able to claim Professional Development Units (PDUs) for our courses, but becoming a Registered Education Provider through the PMI allows us to offer Category 3 PDUs. This makes PDU reporting and tracking easy for attendees at Mountain Goat Software courses. At the end of each course, we provide you with a code that has been registered with the PMI and that authenticates your PDUs.

You can see a complete list of our public agile and Scrum training courses on our website. Courses are also offered for onsite delivery.

We’ll continue to ship via UPS and the US Postal Service both domestically and internationally.

Also, if you didn’t catch the previous announcement, we now have two styles of Planning Poker cards–our branded ones with the mountain goat photos and unbranded ones with a cool burndown chart design. Those cost a bit more but that’s because we sell the branded ones at a bit of a loss. You can check them out on the Mountain Goat Software Store.

The Agile Journal article includes a sidebar by Laurie Williams and Kenny Rubin, my partners on this project. Laurie is currently heading up an effort to refine the questions that form the survey. We could use your help.

In Succeeding with Agile, I describe a waterfallacy as “a mistaken belief or idea about agile or Scrum created from working too long on waterfall projects.” And I give some examples, including these:

• Scrum teams don’t plan, so we’re unable to make commitments to customers.
• Scrum requires everyone to be a generalist.
• Our team is spread around the world, and Scrum requires face-to-face communication.
• Scrum is OK for simple websites, but our system is too complicated.

To enter the post, add a comment to this post telling us about one waterfallacy you’ve encountered and how you overcame that waterfallacy or convinced someone that it was a waterfallacy instead of the truth.

Let’s run this contest until midnight Mountain time on next Monday, 18 January. I’ll then announce winners on Tuesday, 19 January. I’ll pick two winners–the entry that I personally like the best plus one that will be randomly selected.

Good luck and let’s enjoying putting some waterfallacies to rest!

I promised to pick my favorite bit of advice and one random winner. Well, picking just one with so many responses was impossible so I picked two favorites and two random winners. Each winner will receive a copy of Succeeding with Agile, my newest book.

Our first winner is Gabe Brown who said

Scrum is like a mirror, use it like one and see your product and your team for what it really is, not what you think it is. It’ll transform the way you think about building anything.

I love that. I often give this same message to the teams I coach but I don’t say it as well as Gabe did.

Our second winner is Michal Slocinski who said:

My advice is to blur boundaries between developers and testers (this is classic example but applies to all roles) as much as possible. Everyone on the team has to understand that success will come only if people will collaborate without “us and them” mindset.

Yes, yes, yes. We need to blur the boundaries between all roles. What a great way of saying this. We don’t need to get rid of the boundaries (not everyone needs to be a generalist) but we need to blur those boundaries.

I also had my assistant pick two random winners (using the temperature of my CPU at the moment she picked to seed the random number generator). Our winners there are Edson Yanaga and Gerry Kirk.

Please stay tuned. This was so much I’ve got another good idea and we’ll do another contest shortly.

To win, enter as a comment to this post the one most valuable bit of advice you would give to a team that wanted to succeed with agile. I will pick the one bit of advice I like best and send the author a copy of the book. I will also pick a second winner at random from those who submit. So, you’ve got two chances to win so let’s hear your best one bit of advice.

I’ll run the contest through the evening of 11 November. (How about through 11 pm on 11/11?) I’ll pick the winners on 12 November.

Good luck.

Also, this post officially kicks of my 20-posts-in-10-weeks commitment. I’ll be posting here a lot more frequently over the next 10 weeks sharing short ideas from Succeeding with Agile.

So, if you’d like to read this on your Kindle you can subscribe on this page at Amazon.com. They’ll charge you 99 cents a month, which was the lowest option.

Fortunately, with the Succeeding with Agile book now done, I do plan to post here much more frequently so at least you’ll be getting more posts for your 99 cents.