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The strategy laid forward by Cohn is to make an estimate on each user story. I
choose to estimate in Story points. Story points are numbers between 1 and 10
where 1 is 1 unit of time, and 10 is 10 units of time. It is not important to
know how big a unit of time is in true days at this point. This fact goes back
to the fundamental principle of first assessing size of things, then, given a
speed of the development team, we will know how long things will take. The most
important thing is that the story points are consistent among the persons doing
the assessment, which by the way is the team. This team is the smallest
possible, only me.
Do we need to assess all the user stories? Well, yes, but we should not try to
overwork this, just a quick once-thru will do. The story points set on user
stories incorporate everything needed; implementing gui, domain or business
layer, persistence, automated tests, developer verification that it works as
expected, fixing the problems if it does not etc, but since this is the same for
all the user stories we need not really consider it at this point.
The next step is to assign user stories to the first iteration. To know when the
iteration is full we need to know iteration length and team speed. The suggested
iteration length is between 2-4 weeks, but I will go for one week. I am not sure
that I will get whole weeks, more like 25% time I think, so that leaves me with
about 10 hours of work per iteration. Team speed; I think that my speed is 5
user story points per iteration; this is only an estimate I will know better
after the first iteration.
Now we need to choose the user stories that should go into iteration 1. I want
to start to use the tool in iteration 2 so that will influence which stories I
pick. I can pick for 5 points worth since the team speed is 5 story points per
iteration.
I pick user stories 2, 3 and 4; these give me a story point sum of 7, so it is a
bit too much since my limit was 5. I choose to leave the first iteration a bit
overloaded because I feel I need this in order to get a product I can use for
iteration two.
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