Using silent grouping to size user stories

Abstract

User stories are used to describe the functionality delivered in a product or system. Planning Poker is a common technique for sizing user stories, however it has challenges. It can be time consuming and teams can get bogged down in unnecessary discussion. This paper describes a technique called Silent Grouping that can be used to compliment Planning Poker, explaining how to apply it so that large sets of user stories can be sized in minutes. Experiences of seven Scrum teams from Cisco's Unified Communications Business Unit are used as examples. The paper shows how to apply the technique with co-located teams, and includes an example of how it was used with distributed teams. Silent Grouping has several advantages. It is fast, which in turn leads to significant time and cost savings. It also has more subtle benefits. This paper discusses the techniques, challenges, cost savings and benefits of Silent Grouping. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.