Business Finance Homework Help

Discussion: Due 09/02

User story points are critical for estimating the schedule and cost of a SCRUM project. For this discussion:

• Define what user story points are, and explain how they are determined.
• Provide at least four examples of user stories (these can come from your weekly SCRUM Project).  Estimate the points of each example, and explain why you provided the estimate you did. 
• Describe how team velocity is estimated.
• Explain how user story points are used in project management, and how they relate to the team’s velocity.

Explain the advantages of using this approach for project scheduling (rather than the more traditional approach of scheduling around estimation of hours).

Your initial post must be a minimum of 300 words.

Assignment: Due 09/06

Prior to beginning work on this assignment, read Chapters 6 and 7 in your textbook, and watch the Managing Schedule, Release Planning, and Cost with Visual Studio Online (VSO) (Links to an external site.) video. This video will demonstrate how VSO can be used to setup the schedule for your SCRUM project.

Last week, you developed a product backlog for your SCRUM project. This week, you will estimate the schedule of your project in VSO. Follow the steps below to estimate the schedule of your project:

1. Determine the cadence of your iterations.
2. Revisit each work item in your VSO backlog and estimate the level of effort that is required to implement it.
3. Determine the velocity of your team.
4. Calculate the number of iterations that are needed to complete the project.

Assume that you have only 1 SCRUM development team made of three developers. Also assume that the business owners mandated three release dates that the development team must commit to.

Your project schedule must span at least 4 sprints

Once you have estimated your project schedule in VSO, take a screenshot of it to submit for your assignment. Set up the starting dates of your iterations based on either regular work schedule or business mandated dates or both.

In addition to your screenshot, include a 750- to 1250-word (3-5 page) paper with the following:

• Summary of the relative level of effort for the items in your product backlog and your team velocity
• Explanation of your approach to completing this assignment and the decisions you made
• Summary of personal reflection and lessons learned in completing this assignment