Category: Technology
Now that we understand the concept of estimation, we need to talk about how this “credit system” applies to our velocity.
In order to calculate velocity, we need to know how to figure out the amount of effort involved for each feature that a team works on. Before we can get to that, though, we need to determine something else which is crucial. Who, exactly, should be estimating the effort?
Velocity is the key to any project’s success. Plain and simple. I think that just about every project in some way or another tries to figure out this metric. It’s how this metric is obtained that is so important.
When you get on google maps to plan out your vacation and it tells you how long your trip will take you to get there, how does google figure that out? Pretty easily actually. It takes the speed limits of all the roads it finds, and measures the distance of those road segments, and with those two pieces of information it can calculate the amount of time it will take you to get there.
My wife loves to go on vacations. Actually that’s more of an understatement than anything else. The last vacation we went on we went to Orlando, FL and rented a house there while going to Disney World. It was a lot of fun. So what does vacationing have anything to do with project management? Well, I’ll tell you. I call myself a technical team lead. My day usually consists of guiding my team on their current project and coaching them on how to improve themselves. As a lead, one of the things I really care about is knowing how the project we’re working on is coming along. There are a lot of methodologies out there about how to do this, but I want to take a really high level, common sense, approach to this issue and then figure out how the approaches I use work.
