Static, Thrashing and other Communication Dysfunctions

I was recently in a planning poker meeting which is a step in the release planning phase for agile software development projects where user stories are sized relative to each other. This is a critical step to estimating the cost and schedule of a project. By the way we typically call these meetings in our process "sizing" rather than estimating because we are specifically sizing the stories relative to one another, followed by another step to actually determine the estimate in terms of hours and therefore cost and schedule. 

This was one of the most painful meetings I've attended in recent memory. Painful because of the communication (or lack of) taking place during the meeting. While there was no shortage of experienced and talented developers and other stakeholders in the meeting there was a significant shortage of meeting etiquette which resulted not only in the typical thrashing that can plague such meetings but in interruptions, sidebar conversations and conversation threads that didn't pertain to the specific user stories or in some cases the project being sized.

We typically track the time it takes on average per user story across projects when it's feasible to do so in order to inspect and adapt and find ways to optimize the time we spend sizing each story.  What we noticed at the end of this particular meeting was that over 80% of the time spent was in the area of discussing items not specific to the story or in some cases far too specific, which was an indication for us that not enough time was spent in the most productive parts of sizing a story.

Based on this performance we have decided to display simple meeting etiquette rules similar to those types of rules we've seen in other corporate meetings reminding people to focus on participants as they are speaking and to try to limit interruptions unless they feel they're absolutely necessary in terms of understanding the point at hand and limiting side conversations, again unless they're seen as necessary. 

In the context of a user story sizing meeting we've also reminded ourselves of simple adjustments such as letting the customer read the story and then letting developers ask questions by taking turns. We'll ask those people not speaking to write down points or comments they feel they need to make. We hope these steps will go a long way towards focusing the conversation and reducing the needless amounts of static that we witnessed during this meeting and in general help optimize the time spent sizing stories across all of our projects.

While we acknowledge the fact that it's impossible to completely eliminate things such as interruptions and thrashing and even some sidebar conversations especially when you have very bright and creative people in the room such as we did for this meeting, we also feel strongly that if this isn't addressed it will result in not spending resources wisely.