Earlier this year, Dave Bouwman and I took a course in Agile Estimating & Planning taught by Mike Cohn.  It was an excellent course, but I felt I needed a deeper understanding of the subject matter.  Fortunately, Mike wrote a book about the same subject (Agile Estimating & Planning) and it is an excellent primer and team reference for estimating and planning using agile practices (as the title obviously infers).

Who should read this book?  Everyone on your team should read this book. It is relevant to your developers, your ScrumMasters, your managers, and even your sales team.  If your team hasn't read this book, or at least parts of it, give it to them today.

What’s inside?  The book is broken into 7 sections. Mike starts off with a good overview of the purpose of planning, as well as an excellent account of why traditional planning methods (AKA waterfall) fail.  The solution: an Agile approach to estimating and planning. 

The next section, Estimating Size, walks us through the complex issue of how to estimate using size instead of the typical duration.  This is a critical distinction in the way Agile teams estimate their projects and Mike does a great job of walking us through the process; it includes specific techniques for estimating, as well as the distinction between estimating in story points and ideal days, and how to choose between the two.

The third part of the book is about planning for value.  This includes several chapters on how to prioritize your backlog items.  Mike describes specific prioritization considerations including thematic prioritization, financial prioritization, and desirability prioritization.  This section of the book also covers how and when to split user stories as they rise to the top of the prioritized backlog.

Section four covers the topic of scheduling.  In this section, Mike presents the essentials of release and iteration planning.  In addition, he details how to derive your team's velocity from metrics gathered on historical data.  If you don't have historical data, don't despair, after 3 or 4 iterations, you'll have a good idea of what your velocity is.  Other topics covered here include how to buffer your estimates by either feature, schedule, or a combination, as well as planning multiple-team projects.

The fifth part of the book is about how to monitor both your release and iteration plans.  It covers some of the basics such as burn-down charts, parking lot charts, iteration task boards, and how to track effort expended.

The last two sections are kind a "Why Agile Planning Works" conclusion.  It includes reasons why agile planning works as well as a case study of the planning and estimating process.

Why it’s on my bookshelf?  Since our team started using Agile practices and Scrum, one of the key questions that consistently arises in any discussion we have with our managers and other development teams is "How do you guys estimate and plan?".  Or more precisely, "Do you guys plan?".  Yes, we definitely plan.  And this book is kind of the how-to for agile estimating and planning techniques.  Our team has used many of the techniques described by Mike in this book with great success.  As a project manager, I found this book absolutely priceless.  It allowed to me to understand ways to gather meaningful (as opposed to useless) project metrics.  As we move forward developing new business using agile practices, I have gained a great deal of confidence in our ability to more accurately (not precisely) estimate our efforts.  And finally, I have referred several people to this book whenever we get the questions mentioned above.  I recently gave a presentation at a company offsite where I knew the planning question would come up. Using information gained from this book, I was easily able to show the different horizons that our agile team plans at, from the detailed iteration level all the way up to the overarching strategic level. 

If you're practicing Scrum, or any other agile methodology, you owe it to yourself and your team to check out this book.  If you're about to start practicing Scrum, do yourself a big favor and read this book first.  It'll save you a lot of trouble down the road if you start using the techniques described in this book right from the start.

Here’s the skinny on the book:

Title: Agile Estimating and Planning

Author: Mike Cohn

Year: 2005

Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR

Length: 368 pages

ISBN-10: 0131479415

ISBN-13: 978-0131479418

List price: $49.99