White Elephant Sizing – Agile Estimation Method

Example – Online Fitness App

Let’s imagine our Scrum team is tackling a product backlog for a new online fitness app. We’ve got a mix of user stories, and White Elephant Sizing seems like a good way to get a handle on their relative effort.

Preparation:

• Sizing Board: We set up a whiteboard with five size categories: Miniature (1 point), Pocket Rocket (2-3 points), Cardio Crusher (5-8 points), Ironclad (13-20 points), and Mountain Climber (21+ points).
• User Stories: We write each user story on a separate index card, keeping them brief and clear.

The Game:

• Shuffle and Deal: We shuffle the story cards and deal three face-down to each team member.
• Take your turn: One player reveals their first card, reads it aloud, and explains why they think it fits a specific size category. We’ll call him Mark.
• Discussion and Debate: Others can agree or disagree with Mark’s placement, offering their own perspectives and reasoning. For example, Sarah might suggest “Pocket Rocket” as the card involves less complex interactions.
• Final Sizing: After a brief discussion, Mark decides to stick with his initial “Cardio Crusher” placement. He places the card on the board.
• Repeat: The next player takes their turn, revealing and discussing their card. This continues until all cards are placed.

Example Breakdown:

• Story 1: Implement user login and registration functionality (placed in Ironclad by most due to multiple integrations and security considerations).
• Story 2: Design and build a personalized workout recommendation engine (placed in Mountain Climber due to complex algorithms and data analysis).
• Story 3: Add the ability to track completed workouts and progress (placed in Cardio Crusher involving database storage and user interface updates).
• Story 4: Allow users to share their workout results on social media (placed in Pocket Rocket as it’s a relatively straightforward feature).

Outcomes:

• Overall Backlog Size: The distribution of cards across categories gives us a rough idea of the project’s overall complexity. We see a good mix of smaller and larger stories, indicating achievable workload for upcoming sprints.
• Identify Outliers: Stories placed in Mountain Climber and Ironclad might need further breakdown into smaller units for better sprint planning.
• Shared Understanding: Through discussion, everyone gained a clearer understanding of each story’s scope and potential challenges.

Remember:

• Collaboration is key: Encourage open discussion and challenge sizing decisions constructively.
• Relative, not absolute: Focus on comparing stories to each other instead of aiming for perfect point estimates.
• Adapt and refine: White Elephant is a framework, feel free to modify the categories or format to suit your team’s needs.

Additional Techniques

To avoid any clashes or team disappointment for the final results you can employ few techniques like

Timebox: A rough formula is 2 x turn-duration x number of stories can be used to derive time-box. Some stories will take almost no time to estimate. Other stories or high-priority epics require more questions or interaction. Overall, they should balance each other out.

Never-ending story: It may happen that there are no agreement between the team members for a particular story. e.g. one card is moved from one column to another column and back to the first column and so on. To avoid this set a rule that 

• One card can be moved only N number of times or
• After N number of times it becomes a Safe Card and can only be moved to higher estimate.

Final verification: As per the above rule the last user story card will be estimated by the last person but to avoid this the game should continue for one more round. The rule can be modified like

• Last card can be either moved to another column or pass the turn.

You can use Hanoi Tower algorithm to make it more productive and fun.

Hanoi Tower algorithm is a mathematical game or puzzle. It consists of three rods and a number of disks of different sizes, which can slide onto any rod. The puzzle starts with the disks in a neat stack in ascending order of size on one rod, the smallest at the top, thus making a conical shape.

The objective of the puzzle is to move the entire stack to another rod, obeying the following simple rules:

• Only one disk can be moved at a time.
• Each move consists of taking the upper disk from one of the stacks and placing it on top of another stack or on an empty rod.
• No larger disk may be placed on top of a smaller disk.

The minimal number of moves required to solve a Tower of Hanoi puzzle is 2ⁿ − 1, where n is the number of disks. For the Agile Team the tasks for which all members agree will stay at the bottom. The lower the task lies, the more confident team is.

Benefits of White Elephant Sizing

• Fast and engaging: Ditch the long estimation meetings! White Elephant is quick, taking around 30 minutes for a typical backlog. The game format keeps everyone engaged and participating.
• Collective wisdom: Individual biases are minimized as each player contributes their perspective, leading to a more balanced and realistic overall estimate.
• Promotes discussion: Explaining your sizing choices sparks constructive conversations, uncovering potential risks and dependencies early on.
• Transparency and ownership: Everyone sees the sizing decisions in real-time, fostering transparency and a sense of shared ownership over the backlog.

Conclusion

This game helps the team to estimate faster. The fact that one story at a time is introduced helps limit the amount of uncertainty.  So it should also help the team feel more confident in completing their estimation work in a set period of time. But still there are few learnings like

• Group user stories according to their relative size/effort.
• Reach agreement on estimation quickly, if deadlock then apply above techniques to break deadlock.
• Ensure that each team member has their turn to estimate and provide their reason behind estimate.
• No talking among team members helps keep the interactions focused on product owner and team rather than a intra-team focus.
• Apply different techniques to remove deadlock and make the estimation fun.