Agile Anti-Patterns: #6-7

Bart has been in ecommerce for over 20 years, and can't imagine a better job to have. He is interested in all things agile, or anything new to learn.

  Agile   Estimating   Scrum   ProjectsAtWork  

There are many ways that story points are often used incorrectly by well-meaning teams. In the fourth installment of our series, we look at two more agile anti-patterns that seem like good ideas but aren’t: allowing everyone to have a vote, and playing “Go Fish” during planning exercises.

In the first article of this series, we explored the concept of anti-patterns in Agile project management; that is, common solutions to common problems that rarely or never work. One entire class of these problems revolves around the proper use of story points, and second and third articles explored four more ways that story points can be used incorrectly. The comments accompanying these articles show many people are recognizing themselves and their teams in this series. Discovering that our peers have experienced similar issues can be a turning point on the way to Agile success.

Let’s look at two more problems that can crop up with story points, and why they seem like good ideas but really aren’t.

Story Point Anti-Pattern #6: One man, one vote

There are two places that story point values get assigned to stories. One is during grooming sessions, where the users stories are examined and detailed. Those sessions sometimes have the entire team in attendance, other times it may have only a few representatives. The purpose of these meetings is to get the …

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