Book recommendations

I’m often asked for book recommendations on various agile topics. There is no single best book to start with so I’m giving you a bunch of categories to pick from.

Monte Carlo under the covers

Monte Carlo forecasting is the most common form of probabilistic forecasting that we see. It’s compelling because it can provide a highly accurate forecast of when work will be done, with relatively little effort.

What is Probabilistic Forecasting?

Do your customers ever ask “When will it be done?” When dealing with the future, there’s almost never an accurate deterministic answer (Tuesday, exactly at 3:45pm) to that question but there is an accurate probabilistic answer (85% chance of completion on or before October 1) and in most cases, it’s a lot easier to calculate than you’d expect.

Jirametrics 2.0

Jirametrics version 2.0 has been released. What is it? A tool for extracting metrics, and generating reports from Jira.

Forecasting projects

Weather predictions are probabilistic, not deterministic. That means there isn’t a single right answer that we can calculate. We can’t say it will rain at 11:05 but we can say that there’s an 80% chance of rain today. Forecasting when we’ll be done is also probabilistic, in exactly the same way. We can say based on past throughput data that we have an 85% chance of being done on or before May 12.

Data Accuracy

We have a tendency to believe that anything we see in a chart is 100% accurate, although that’s often not true. To understand the accuracy of the chart, we have to understand a couple of things:

  1. How accurate the initial data was.
  2. How much of the original data set was used in the chart.
  3. How good the chart is at communicating the right message.

Stalled work

As I talked about in this earlier video on standups, the work on our board can loosely be grouped into three categories. It’s either active, blocked, or stalled. We tend to spend a lot of time talking about the active and blocked work and have a tendency to forget about the rest, which results in stalled work aging unnecessarily. That in turn will make the overall system less effective and less predictable.

Slicing epics

We talk a lot about slicing stories but then when it comes to slicing larger types (epics, features, etc), we tend to wave our hands and say “it’s the same, only bigger”, which while true, is rarely helpful.

Remote work vs in-person: What does the data say?

When the worst effects of COVID had appeared to pass, many companies started implementing return-to-office mandates for their knowledge-workers, which have been controversial at best. The decision to do this was based on gut reactions from managers who, having no actual data, made the best guesses they could with what they knew.