Analytics/Scrum Planning

How We Plan
This document describes the methodology the analytics team uses to plan work for scrum, the intended audience is a new team member of analytics team.

Planning Poker
We have a tasking meeting every week. The product manager and scrum master are responsible for having stories ready to be estimated by the developer team.

We estimate stories in points and tasks in hours. We use a pseudo-Fibonacci sequence to estimate tasks (0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13...). The idea is that the Fibonacci number represents the size  of the story. Complexity is a factor when estimating the task but so is logistical and busywork as those add to size.

Examples: A simple story made up of a simple coding task is consider to be a 3. We always include writing tests and testing in staging in our estimation of the coding task. The simplest task you could think of would be a '1' but if it is worthy of a story it should be estimated.

The points help us calculate our velocity per sprint and see how are we doing as time and projects move along.

Every story is made of tasks and we estimate tasks in hours, we use hours cause we want to decouple the size of a story (measured in points) versus the duration (measured in hours). Obviously size and duration are related but their ratio is not always identical per story.