Estimating velocity, twittering on paper

One of the tenets of agile project management is a focus on velocity, which means in this context some kind of accurate measurement of how long tasks actually take vs. how long you planned to do them. If you have good estimates from the past as to how many work units you have to do and how long each work unit takes to accomplish, you might just be able to predict when you'll be done.

I did some velocity estimation at the cafe tonight. As an exercise in writing a lot of words in not very much time, I twittered to myself taking notes on some thoughts I was having and wrote them down on paper (mercifully sparing my SMS friends who won't have to pay $0.15 each to get a record of my inner thoughts). At top mocha fueled speed, a quadrille page filled up in 17 minutes, and I time stamped each line. A second pair of pages took 75 minutes (37 min/page) after some of the coffee wore off and with the writing mixed in with conversations.

It was a really weird way to write, almost like instant messaging myself on paper. I love it when the structures of the net infect my paper notebooks, and it was a very productive way to capture a lot of thinking concisely and without getting too distracted. I cheated a couple of times by IM'ing friends (you'll note the previous entry about time tracking) from my mobile device while I was writing - the effect on paper is to have someone else's thoughts in the same format intermingle with yours.

I don't think it would work for me without coffee, not the top speed writing. I was able to keep up without any problems. As a practice of notebook keeping, time stamping your entries is a good standard practice, but I hadn't thought of them as twitters (as opposed to paragraphs) until tonight.

Seen previously: My quadrille notebook looks like Gmail; my writing on paper looks like web pages; my mind is a web browser.

Technorati Tags: agile, projectmanagement, velocity, cariboucoffee, twitter, quadrille, jabber, paper, coffee

Comments

[Edward Vielmetti]

i tell people about this (via twitter) and they say "too geeky"