Backlog estimation photos

Over the years my company has acquired several companies products which do the same thing, in different technologies. They are all aging and becoming very difficult to maintain (gross understatement here). My current project is taking “like” functionality out of the products and creating a new platform in order to migrate our customer base and deprecate the old applications.

Our organization is fairly new to Agile/SCRUM. We have always struggled to create the master backlog for this project. Along with adapting to a new process, it has been especially challenging for our product owners to consider the 60,000+ customers in which they proxy for.

The project is 16 iterations in (2 week), we are making great progress and are trying to finalize the vision of our first release. Over the past 3 weeks our product owners & scrum masters took over a conference room and flushed out the remaining backlog items for our first delivery. As you can imagine it was a very tedious task, but I for one am extremely excited about the results. No it is not perfect, Yes there will be changes, but its great to visualize what we are trying to do in its entirety.

This last week the teams were brought in to do estimations and tweak stories (combine/split) to complete the backlog. Here are a few photos from the last 15 minutes on Friday as we were finishing up.

Chickens!

Here is our awesome Scrum Master John P in action

Windows are great with sticky cards

We use planning poker (fibonacci seq) for estimations, here is my sweet deck. You also have to take note of the orange with the painted face in the coffee cup. He is our bad mojo orange, so anytime you are getting frustrated there is a big scene and you have to touch the orange to remove your evil thoughts. Though by the end of the week it was kind of getting gross.

And this is what happens when your test engineers are trapped in a room with markers for a long period of time

And of course my favorite card, inspired by “doodle the developer” (Aka Steve J). It works nicely in place of the ‘Infinity’ card.