Another recommended book by Mike Cohn. One of the biggest challenges in every project is planning. How much work will it be? When will I finish? This books offers a lot of advice on how to tackle those challenges in an agile way.

Overall this is a very helpful book and you will find answers to common planning and estimating problems in every chapter. I particularly liked the case study at the end, where Mike Cohn takes all of the info in the book together and presents it in the form of a story about a fictional company that is starting with agile. It is enlightening to see all the concepts covered in the book being used in a "real life" situation.

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Book Review: Agile Estimating And Planning By Mike Cohn: A Must Read For All Agile Aspirants

This is an excellent book written by Mike Cohn who is the founder of Mountain Goat Software. The title of the book Agile Estimating And Planning says it all for estimating and planning of an Agile Project. It says if the planning and estimating is not done in an agile way, the agile project is not relevant to this estimating and planning. Without taking agile into account while planning and estimating of your projects, you cannot run your projects in Agile way.

Mountain Goat Software is a legendary, over 20 years old company engaged in consulting in process and project management. The company is a leading training organization for many global corporate. Mike Cohn has clientele ranging from small start-ups to a large number of top 40 Fortune companies. Mike is also a founding member of well known Agile Alliance besides being a regular contributor to a number of related magazines and a renowned speaker at a number of conferences. Mike has also written a good amount of books like User Stories Applied in 2004.

Agile Estimating and Planning talks of a number of important features like planning, estimating and scheduling thereby answering the questions like - What to plan to build and its timelines, sizing of estimations and when to do what with a quantitative answer to "How much?". The book has 7 sections and 23 chapters. At the end of each chapter you will find a well organized set of key learning points from that chapter to be imbibed in real life scenarios. The book has intelligently taken care of global companies without being focused on a specific country.

Part 1 of the book focuses on importance of planning, problems arising out of wrong planning and how to set goals in an agile atmosphere. A good plan needs to be built in a crisp manner to make is agile planning. Whereas Chapter 1 explains above, chapter 2 talks about the difference between traditional, orthodox project approach where estimating and planning go usually haywire, thus resulting in project delays or failures. In chapter 3 we learn about the meaning of agility and the broad level significance of agile estimating and planning that is further explained to micro level in further chapters.

Part 2 talks in depth about project estimation, estimation sizing and estimation duration. Story building is well explained in chapter 4 & 5. Chapter 6 deals with story points with a fantastic explanation on planning poker. Chapter 7 further focuses on alignment of story points with estimations and thus reviewing at the end of each story point so as to go for re-estimating.

Overall a must read for all agile aspirants to experts so as to gain a great deal of insight on the subject.

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Informative and useful, written from author's own experiences and opinions. The author presents all known tools/approaches, then explains which ones are appropriate in which scenario, why/how so, and his preferences if any. Having lots of author's own experiences and fictional stories makes this book easily comprehensible.

Excellent resource for agile project management. I'd call it a must-read for product owners and agile team managers, and I'd absolutely encourage scrum masters and development team members to read it - it could only make them better. This book has the obligatory coverage of scrum and agile basics, but differentiates itself with topics on broader and longer-term planning, like themes, milestones, and communicating schedules. I found all of this useful and plan to reread it in the future. I disagreed with a few very specific tactical recommendations in this book (scrum basics stuff), so I wouldn't recommend starting with this one alone. I still recommend starting with Essential Scrum.

Great book. Estimating techniques in the Agile framework can be a bit hard to understand at first. This book provides a very clear explanation of the what's and why's of it.

This book provides a lot of detail about different aspects of agile project estimation. Mike Cohn gives lots of pointers on planning to deliver value, picking story points, sizing stories and breaking them down into tasks, measuring and visualizing velocity and progress. The book is easy to read, and has very concrete advice and techniques that could be applied to either set up an agile project from scratch or to tweak an existing process. There are also plenty of examples and a full case study at the end of the book if that's how you prefer to learn.
I especially liked the author's thorough approach to all levels of project estimation and tracking. It made clear some of the things I struggled with on Agile projects in the past. If you have an impression that Agile's approach to project planning and tracking is any less thorough than any of the more "traditional" ones, then reading this book will definitely change your mind.

GReat reading not only on how to properly estimate...but especially on...WHY!

A very good one to embark on Agile journey

This book really shed a light on the entire agile process while focusing on the planning topic. I was already familiar with agile methods but this book still reminded me of many things that I have either taken for granted or forgotten. The last chapter was especially helpful because it summarized most of the book in a nice use case.

Never hurts to hone your skills in this topic.

Definitely the book that I was looking for when faced with the task of how to be _agile_ in a traditional corporate setting where estimations are treated as commitments and written in contracts between businesses.

As the title suggests, this book discusses the practical and concrete steps on how to be agile when asked for estimations and how to plan around them - and more importantly, the rationale behind them. From defining an a unit of measure like a story point, which IMO is a complex concept that has been simplified too much, to abstract concepts such as ideal days and separating estimations for sizes and time.

Though of course not all practices and ideas mentioned in this book will be applicable to every organisation, this is a good place to start to get ideas on how to improve the agility of any team _(reading blogs and agile pamphlets just won't cut it_).

Rated four stars because any book or practice that wants to form the agile mind set into a framework or set of processes should always circle back to the original manifesto and principles of agile.

Overall I enjoyed reading this book. I started reading this with the need to learn estimating and planning in an organisation that wants to be agile but won't and finished it with wanting to learn everything the book has to offer even if I already left my original organisation.

Great book talking about planning and estimating in agile