Estimating & Planning (training)
Wednesday this week, I was fortunate in that one of my teammates arranged for Mike Cohen, a known agile guru, to come and present his estimating & planning course to our group. He was a great teacher who presented well and the material was good - so 2 thumbs up.
One of the interesting topics that came up was measuring units of work (hours, points, bananas, etc). In one exercise he had the class divide into two groups bent on proving why one method was better than the other (the two we were using at the time were 'Ideal Days' and 'Story Points'). I found it was easier to argue the 'ideal day' due to: the familiarity of the concept 'day' and touting the ease at which an ideal day (or collection of) was converted to actual days (say, for mgmt or mktg), easier learning curve, etc.
All in all, a good use of my group's time - I'm glad we have the ability to take a day here and there to learn together.
