Here’s the notes I took from Ken’s demo at #xp2011:
- About 50 or so post it notes with different animals on them
- Aim was to size the animals
- Board with columns from Fibonacci sequence
- Ungrouped animals all on left hand side of the columns, ready to be sized.
- Everyone agrees on a median animal and places that as size 8.
- Everyone lines up behind the board
- One at a time move an unsorted animal into a column then go to the back of the line, all in SILENCE
- Repeat until all the animals are in columns (backlog is gone)
- Now everyone gathers round the board in SILENCE
- Everyone moves the animals to where they think they belong
- Can still move an animal if someone else has already moved it
- This continues until everyone stops moving animals. Wait for a minute or two to make sure people are happy
- Should have a ? column to move animal/story if there is not enough information to size a story
- Then can discuss if required
In the demo, using this method it took 6 minutes to size 50 stories!
We tried Silent Grouping in our planning session before I went on holiday and it went down really well! In retrospect we decided it would be good to have a speech mark column for those that possibly need more discussion and anything in that column, or the ? column is not allowed to be moved. We’ll give it a try next time to see if the weaker willed people would feel happier about it, rather than just giving in.
Thanks so much again Ken!
