Talkilla/Estimation Meetings

Note: Talkilla has now been superseded by the Loop project

Estimation Meetings

If you haven't read it already, please read the Talkilla Agile Process overview, especially the section on Estimation.

Estimation meetings are the beginning of the development process. They are primarily used to estimate the complexity of user stories. In doing the estimation, uncertainties, technical issues and other possible problems are uncovered providing feedback to the product team before cards are worked on by engineers.

Format

Each estimation meeting will look at the "Ready for Estimation" column in the Backlog. Ideally, folks will have read through the column before the meeting.

Card Estimation

At the meeting, we generally have a mixture of Product, UX and Engineering folks. Only the Engineering folks estimate cards, the Product and UX folks are there to help answer any questions.

• For each card, we spend a few minutes discussing the card, resolving any issues if possible.
• Then we'll vote on the card according to the ratings
  • Sometimes engineers may decide not to vote. This is fine, it is typically when they don't know the area of code well enough.
• If we all agree, the card is marked with the rating
• If we disagree, then we discuss the differences in rating, followed by more estimation cycles

Sometimes issues can't be resolved, and we'll then do one of several things:

• Push the card back to the product team for further detail and/or splitting into multiple cards
• Request a 'spike' card, which is a short card to investigate with some code, or other means, how much work it would be to do the user story, which then feeds back into a future estimation meeting.

Other outcomes are possible, we generally take it on a card-by-card basis.

Schedule

Estimation Meetings are held every Wednesday at 16:45 GMT

Dial-In Details

• WebRTC-Apps Vidyo Room
• Please use headsets not open speakers, and mute yourselves when not speaking

• Dial-in: Audio-only conference# 99431
  • People with Mozilla phones or softphones please dial x4000 Conf# 99431
  • US/Toll-free: +1 800 707 2533, (pin 4000) Conf# 99431
  • US/California/Mountain View: +1 650 903 0800, x4000 Conf# 99431
  • US/California/San Francisco: +1 415 762 5700, x4000 Conf# 99431
  • US/Oregon/Portland: +1 971 544 8000, x4000 Conf# 99431
  • CA/British Columbia/Vancouver: +1 778 785 1540, x4000 Conf# 99431
  • CA/Ontario/Toronto: +1 416 848 3114, x4000 Conf# 99431
  • UK/London: +44 (0)207 855 3000, x4000 Conf# 99431
  • FR/Paris: +33 1 84 88 37 37, x4000 Conf# 99431
  • Gmail Chat (requires Flash and the Google Talk plugin): paste +1 650 903 0800 into the Gmail Chat box that doesn't look like it accepts phone numbers
  • SkypeOut is free if you use the 800 number
• For Backchannel, #talkilla on irc.mozilla.org