Animal Estimating: Online

Want to teach whole-team relative size estimating using affinity estimating?

Animal Estimating: Online is the activity for you and your learners. This template includes all the instructions that your learners need to learn how to estimate work in story points using affinity estimating.

Facilitators, follow these steps to use this activity:

1. Create a new board and add this template. I usually add one instance of the template for every five students.

2. Share an Edit link with your students.

3. Ask your students to volunteer for the various roles.

   • Product Owner: Tells Development Team members what the next dog breed is and answers questions about the dog breeds. If there is only one team of students, the teacher plays the role Product Owner.

   • Scrum Master: Facilitates planning poker for the rest of the team

   • Development Team members: Play planning poker with each other to estimate the size of the work tasks.

4. If there are multiple teams, each team has one Product Owner, one Scrum Master, and numerous Development Team members.

5. Set up the game scenario. I usually say something like this:

   • Hello, team(s)!

   • My advisors have done some market research, and we have discovered some interesting characteristics about this region of the world. It turns out that the people in this region have large disposable incomes and they love wildlife reserves. We have put these two characteristics together and determined that there is a business opportunity for an amazing new wildlife reserve.

   • We have recruited you to be a team of animal caretakers.

   • We want your help estimating the amount of work it is to groom various kinds of animals. We'll use your estimates to guide us as we launch operations.

   • We are asking you for help because we know from past experience that the people doing the work are the best people to estimate the size of the work.

   • Follow the steps on your activity board, one step at a time.

   • If you want more information about the animaly ask your Product Owner for help. If they can answer your question, they will. Product Owner(s), if you want help, you can ask me for more information—I am the Chief Product Owner.

Enjoy the learning!