Iterex Planning Cards

I don't understand where I can insert the story ponts that I have used to complete my story? I only see % complate options.

 A:  XP is based on original estimates, however it probably still works the way you want. What you do is use the tracking tab, and for each story you enter how much of that story you have completed - e.g. 25%, if you have just got started,   75% if you are almost done etc. It is deliberatly non precise hence the limited list of %'s.

You have two ways of using this approach

1) Each day (or periodically) everyone updates their progress on the items and associates that % with a date

2) At the end of the iteration for each item you enter the final completion % complete for each item

If you use method 1 - you will get a daily graph showing progress (new teams find this useful to guide their discipline). If you use 2- you will probably only use the Report graph for the entire sprint/release (more seasoned teams are able to gauge their daily progress during an iteration by phsical cues often like an information radiator) and only get a longer term indicator of efficiency.

 This style of measurement differs from the more traditional approach to record actual time spent and spot where people have estimated incorrectly, and that by knowing the error you will estimate better the next time.

However it's only after using the new numbers and at the end of the next iteration that you will know if using that information actually worked (its like a dog chasing its own tail).

Instead XP say - accept the reallity that you are not good at estimating at the moment. Use the data that you have already measured to guide you on what you can complete now. Then estimate the same way (chances are you will compensate as its fresh in your memory becasue you are using short iterations) and what should happen is that you will definetly achieve your goal and should be able to do a bit more (probably not as much as you think though). If you do more, your velocity will increase and you will get a new number which you have measured and can use to move forward.

 This has a nice tendency to focus people on completion, not on how long they have spent. Over time the team then understands what they can achieve and actually has more experience in estimationg.

With this approach you still get some information on things that have gone wrong. Your biggest error is on the items you didn't complete and are only a % done. These are items to talk about in a retrospective. Very rarely, you might get a subset of items that are all 100% complete and each one took a little bit longer than expected and so you couldn't complete everything. Again, you can look at these items and ask what happened (although this is a rare case as generally what you lose on some items you gain on others - and so it often just balances out).

 Finally , your other indicator are the stories that keep appearing in iteration after iteration without being finished. Again its worth finding out what is happending with these stories (its normally not an estimation problem, but an issue with acceptance criteria).

It is planned that Iterex will give you reports on the above types of behavior so that you can discuss these problems with the. It is possible to do all of this without stressing out about how long each individual item took and worrying about if you helped another person with a story do you have to track your time on that story.