Task estimation sessions (Bebop)

Discussions - Public
1

We discussed rethinking estimation sessions back in planning for the processes revamp epic (BB-10142), but this wasn’t high enough in the priority list to make it for the first iteration.

However, I’ve found that in Bebop, we’re still not using the estimation sessions.

  • In the last 6 sprints, we’ve averaged 1.3 participants in the estimations sessions. This isn’t enough to make these estimation sessions worth it - eg. last sprint the story points set based on the session are simply my guesses.
  • No-one was against dropping the estimation sessions in BB-10314 processes revamp poll.
  • The other cells have not been using estimation sessions for a long time now.

In light of this, I propose dropping the estimation sessions from next sprint. In future we can incrementally refine how we manage story points in our docs.

If anyone has anything against this plan, please voice your concerns below before March 3.

Thanks. :slight_smile:

Ticket: BB-3149

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2

As I received no dissenting comments, and only positive reactions, I’ll take this as ok to go ahead. :slight_smile:

There will be no estimation sessions as of this sprint (372). :slight_smile:

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I opened a PR to the handbook at opencraft/documentation/public!658 to remove this from our processes; please take a look if you’re interested or have concerns.

I also deactivated the checklist items in the Listaflow sprint checklist template regarding estimation sessions.

@tikr or @braden do you know how the estimation sessions automation in jira works? Could you help me disable it so no new sessions are created? Thanks. :slight_smile:

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4

Perhaps Braden can confirm, but I think the automation code for creating estimation sessions is part of SprintCraft :slightly_smiling_face:

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5

@samuel, @tikr, yep, we can comment out this code (we can keep move_out_injections_task if we want).

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6

Thanks @tikr , I forgot you’d already pointed that out. :slight_smile:

Thanks @Agrendalath :slight_smile:

I believe we can drop the part about moving out injections - there were some comments about that being annoying. But that can be a discussion for another day. :slight_smile:

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I opened a PR to sprintcraft to disable the automation tasks: opencraft/dev/sprintcraft!71 :slight_smile:

@tikr @Agrendalath

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8

This has now been merged and deployed. We shouldn’t get any new estimation sessions created. :slight_smile:

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9

:waving_hand:

Just checking back in here. We’ve been running without estimation sessions for a few months now. From my perspective, everything is business as usual. I see tickets more and more without story point estimates, which is no problem apart from them not showing green for “ready for a sprint”. Maybe we can just make story points completely optional and drop them from the “ready for a sprint” rule?

Has anyone noticed any issues related to the removal of estimation sessions? cc @braden @tikr

:slight_smile:

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