Estimating story points, agile planning, and JIRA.

First time using JIRA to manage these goals:

  • Learn JIRA
  • Learn Node, React, GraphQL
  • Learn React Native
  • Learn data engineering with Airflow and Scala
  • Learn app deployment with Kubernetes in GCP
  • Build a web app
  • Build a mobile app

I am grouping my learning efforts into epic sprints and trying to set story points. Initially I thought of setting a point of 1 to project or product management tasks and a point of 2 to tech related learning.

I set a sprint with one story to complete watching 7 tutorials in two days but that time expired as I deviated into the rabbit hole of estimations. That proves the lesson on “don’t estimate stories in hours.” I also didn’t extend the sprint as described in the scrum website here

I read the tutorial on planning poker in the Atlassian blog here and also got the book ‘Agile Estimating and Planning’.

The recommendation is to start with this range of numbers, which I’m not sure how they were chosen, they don’t double and some don’t add to the previous number, they are also not the Fibonacci sequence (only up to 13):

  • 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, and 100

Or use this range, which doubles the number. These are easier to remember:

  • 1, 2, 4, 8, and so on.

The moderator reads the story and scrum team members discuss the complexity of that story (time, effort, resources), then each score the story and iterate the discussion until there is a consensus for each story. Use a range of numbers so it doesn’t take as long.

I would probably use double the number up to five numbers to make it easier:

  • 1, 2, 4, 8, 16

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