I have clients that refuse to use another tool, refuse another sign up in their email account . In the same time those clients are mostly chaotic to unorganized and we tend to repeat the same points over and over again in the course of a year until all points are fulfilled (web platform dev work).
This tool seems like the just Trello enough for ONE single view - no explanation to give - will try this from next week's meeting call on
If velocity is 20, then 20 points worth of stories fit into an iteration (week). Points include testing, so that isn't cut out, like with sprints. As a PM, I can get developers to point stories out for a few weeks worth of iterations. If I need to move stories around, I can do that easily and I can see how moving things around affects 'when it will be available'.
If I was going to use another tool, I'd want PT's 'velocity' as a base feature for sure.
Pivots get into work at the same time, work together all day and then get to leave at the exact sane normal 8 hour work day. Every single day. Sounds like a great job to me.
Roadmapping (or in this case, user story mapping) is usually done independently from Sprint planning as a way to develop and share the product roadmap so that your team can prioritize Jira/Pivotal tickets or whatever your team uses for tracking Sprint tasks.
https://content.pivotal.io/blog/inception-knowing-what-to-bu...
Sticky notes are something more dynamic and hand writing things out makes you think more about things than just filling out boxes on a screen. It also allow you to iterate quickly and just toss the ideas you don't like into a corner.
Those stickies turn into 8 point (or unpointed) stories, put into Tracker, which then get broken down into smaller stories which can be discussed (iteration planning meetings) tasked out and worked on.
So yea... I guess if someone made me use a tool like this over simple sticky notes, I'd probably be really frustrated at the end of the day.
Good work!
Perhaps place an undo button nearby or somehow decrease touch sensitivity without removing functionality?
I've seen 1 team good enough at pointing to do 2 week Sprints, call their velocity, and generally nail it.
It was a small federal team on a mature (7 year old) coldfusion application with a backlog that mainly involved minor features and bug fixes, where the app had a narrow clear scope.
The startups I've been involved in are too chaotic. When you have a team lead or project manager who never met a feature request they could say "no" or "that's not urgent" too, the problem is even worse. Also when your domain or features are generally not well defined "let's bolt a full CRM onto this now"
Among the chaos, I still go home on time every day.
I do agree that the PM has to be excellent at writing stories and the team has to be good at pushing back on the PM to say that a story is too big and to break it up appropriately into smaller stories.
Two week sprints are awful. Nobody should ever be in that. The problem is that the team works for 2 weeks and then after those two weeks, everyone stands up and shows what they did. If you don't hit the mark, then it is another two weeks. Now a single feature can be held up for 4+ weeks! Or even worse, you cut out things like testing to make the 2 week sprint.
The pivotal model of making smaller features and factoring in testing into the pointing ensures that nobody is working alone for 2 weeks without any oversight.
The whole idea is not to force people into a box. It is to just give PM's a way to plan the future. Obviously, things can change so it isn't some forceful thing at all.
Don't knock it until you've tried it. I had an opinion like you and then I went and worked in this system and it totally changed my mind.