Order My Stories - A New Estimation Game

While working with teams, I notice that many agile teams are struggling with estimation. In this article I will not discuss the usefulness of estimation vs no-estimates, this is a different topic, in this article I will mention some of the challenges I notice, and I will share with you an estimation game that I believe help agile teams apply relative estimation in an easy and straightforward way.

Some challenges agile teams face with estimation

1. Understanding the idea of story points, complexity estimation and relative estimation.
2. Dissociating story points from man days: Some teams do associate story points estimation with man-days which is not recommended.
3. Estimating the real complexity of a story without setting a mental limit: what happens sometimes is that teams associate 8 story points with large stories and for all the stories that they judge big they pick 8 without differentiating between big, very big and very very big.
4. Juniors and Seniors in the same team having equal opportunity to engage: Seniors forget to involve juniors, and juniors worry about giving their opinion
5. Anchoring: even though we coach teams and scrum masters to avoid anchoring during estimation, anchoring still happens and one team member can easily say “this is easy”, “this is like a story we did last sprint”, “this is very big” and the others will be automatically affected.
6. Trying to find accurate estimation and going into long debates if a story is small or medium, 3 or 5 …
7. Estimation sessions taking too long

The above challenges and others don’t only make estimation sessions a pain for agile teams, they also alter the agile estimation concept and prohibit uncovering some important information during the estimation session while focusing the discussion on numbers.

The “Order My Stories” Estimation Game

Game Preparation:

1. Write / Print the stories you want the team to estimation independently on sticky notes or regular paper. (each story on a separate paper or separate sticky note)
2. Agree with the team on the estimation scale they want to use for story points: Fibonacci Series, Poker Planning? numbers, T-shirt Size…. (this scale should be used in all their future estimations so they can compute their velocity)
3. Select a Benchmark story: You and the team select a story from last sprint that is completed already, all the team agrees on its size (in story points) and all the team knows what it is about. (This step is optional a variation of this estimation method can be used without using a Benchmark story specially if the team is new)

Order My Stories Game

Step 1: Put the story you selected on the table (without its Estimate- don’t write the associated story points on it) – This will be your benchmark story.

Step 2: Put all the stories you want to estimate face down on the table (or you can distribute them to the participants)

Step 3: Play Round 1, ask each person from the team to silently pass by the table, take 1 story and put it on the table before or after the story (ies) that are already there based on whether it is smaller or bigger than that story. (make sure that this round is silent, this is very important for anchoring). They keep doing so until they don’t have any story at hand. At the end of Round 1 you have your stories ordered.

Step 4: Play few more rounds, ask the attendees to pass by the table and each person can do 1 of 4 moves

• Move a story one step back
• Move a story one step forward
• Talk about a story (explain they think it doesn’t have the right place) – but don’t move it
• Say “Pass” if you are satisfied with the ordering.
• Repeat Until all the team members say "Pass"

Step 5: When all the team members have said ‘Pass’, Go to the Benchmark story and set its original estimate. Pick the next or previous story and ask the team the following question:

“Is this story equal or larger/smaller to the benchmark story?”

If the answer is equal you add the equal number of story points, if it is larger you add the next number on the Poker planning? series or Fibonacci series and if it is smaller you add the smaller number.

Another version of playing this game

without a Benchmark story

You ask the team to order the stories following the same rules, you go to the second story in the sequence and ask the team if it is the same size as the first one or bigger, you do the same with all the stories and you just mark each story by Equal “=” or bigger “>” then you set the first story to 1 or 2 (I prefer to set the first story to 2 to allows for creating smaller stories later especially if there is the need to break down stories later on) and continue based on the series you are using.

Advantage of “Order My Stories” game:

Here are some advantages to using “Order My Stories” game:

1.     Estimation is not directly associated with a number (story points or man-days), teams are really estimating relatively here. 

2.     For new agile teams, this method help them grasp the idea of relative estimation easily without struggling with the concept of story points. For experienced agile team this method help them move away from detail oriented discussions to find the perfect estimation

3.     For teams estimating a lot of stories in one session, this estimation game allows them to estimate many stories quickly

4.     Everybody can express their opinions easily without being affected by others opinion

5.     There is no big room for anchoring as estimation is happening through collectively ordering the stories rather than estimating each story individually

Few notes for facilitators

1.     If you have a large team or too many stories to estimate you can limit the number of rounds to 3 or 4 lets say so the game will not take a lot of time.

2.     It is important to use the same estimation series scale in all the estimation sessions so the team can compute their velocity based on the same scale.

3.     It is important to run the first round silently, to avoid anchoring.

If you have further questions about Estimation or agile adoption in general feel free to contact me.