Yet another estimation rant

Lately I've been discussing estimation a lot with both colleagues and friends so I guess it is time to go at it again. As I've mentioned several times before; I'm not a believer in estimates. The process of estimating is good in order to understand and break down complex problems but the estimate itself as limited (if any) value in my opinion.

Should bugs be user stories

One topic that seems to come up regularly when teams try to be adopt agile is how to deal with bugs. Since these teams typically give Scrum a try they feel the urge to get as many story points as possible so it is natural to wanting to give these bugs story points so you get some credit for them. IMHO that is a huge mistake.

When do your chickens show up?

One thing with Scrum that I never really saw happen was chickens showing up for the daily stand-up and get a feel for where the team was heading. Essentially I never saw chickens other than in sprint demos. That was until recently.

Who writes acceptance criteria?

In the past I've seen two different approaches to user story acceptance criteria writing. My current team introduced a new variant I like. And it is related to how the military works.

TFS Anti-Patterns: Copying work items

Over my years at Microsoft I have encountered what I'd like to call the work item copy anti pattern.

My worst stand-up(s)

Reading this story about the worst daily scrum ever made me think about my own experience. An both actually reminds me of what happened in the linked story.

Estimating projects

Several years ago I told a story about a project that proved that estimation was a waste of time once the work was split up in small enough chunks. Not necessarily equal size of chunks but manageable size chunks. But sometimes you need to do estimations because somebody wants to know the cost of some project or large feature.