Building on their work on Real Options, Chris Matts and Olav Maassen are writing a graphic novel to explain the concepts and share their knowledge in the area. They discussed the novel, the process of producing it and the crowdsourcing model of funding with Shane Hastie from InfoQ. A sample chapter is available for InfoQ readers to download.
Joel Semeniuk discusses ways of making better project estimates excluding guessing as much as possible.
Story points are about estimating relative effort, gauging how difficult it will be to complete one feature relative to another. They are an abstraction of the cost, effort, and labor needed to produce that feature. Simple enough concept right? Wrong. Some teams are using story points to rank features rather than estimate effort. Hard to believe? Read on.
Velocity, the measure of work completed by the team divided by the time taken to complete it, is increasingly being used to manage the productivity of a team and as a comparison between teams. Jim Highsmith, Mark Levison, and Scott Ambler discuss the misuse of velocity as a productivity measure.
