Calculating the total points for the first iteration …
A friend of mine has had one of those awkward meetings at his Company where they want to bang a hamster through a star shaped hole and not make a mess, you know the ones. In his case it was on how long his project would be without having all the requirements, fun times for him.
The project is an Agile one so the developers started explaining the Point scheme and how they had a heuristic from the last project that we wanted to use for this one as a starting point. However, the road-block, head against a brick wall came about when his management estimated the “optimum” points for the team and thought their heuristic was too low. He says it went something like this ….
You have 5 developers and an iteration of two weeks, so that is 5 x 10 = 50 points.
He explained that this was totally unrealistic since it didn’t even account for toilet breaks during the working day. His management relaxed the estimate by 40%.
This was still double their established heuristic which he thought they could improve on, but at least their heuristic was a realistic starting point.
Luckily, Fred, a member of his development team piped up with a formula for determining a good starting Point Count for the iterations. It went something like this:
Days in Iteration x Developers in team x Skill Level of Developers x Company Efficiency.
Interestingly this formula resulted in a point count that was higher than his heuristic but one that was lower than “60% of optimum” that was proposed by his management.
The Skill level a developer is a measure of their efficiency when working on the project, while the Company efficiency is a measure of what percentage of time at work the developer is involved in actually developing for the project. For example, he has a regular company meetings and other non-project interruptions which all reduce the time his developers can be working on the project. He quickly noticed how the Company Efficiency and Skill level effected the Point Count dramatically. Here is how his figures looked:
10 x 5 x 70% x 85% = 29.75 Points
He reached an agreement using the formula. Maybe you can use the Point Count as a start and then as each Iteration completed you can use the achieved Points as the goal for the next iteration, which also means you need to use the achieved Points in the Planning games.