Scrum by Jeff Sutherland

Author:Jeff Sutherland [Sutherland, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 978-0-385-34646-7
Publisher: Random House Inc.
Published: 2014-09-29T16:00:00+00:00

The sequence is how nature lays itself out, whether it be in the shell of a nautilus, the branches on a tree, the bumps on a pineapple, or the petals of a pinecone. It shows up in cauliflower and the curves of the human brain. It’s the same whether you’re looking at the curl of a fern leaf or the shape of a galaxy. It’s one of those phenomena that, when you think about it, is pretty freaky.

There’s a name for this phenomenon—it’s called the “Golden Mean” or the “Golden Ratio.” We’ve built it into buildings and art. From the Parthenon in Athens to the Great Mosque of Kairouan in Tunisia. We’ve used it to decide the size and shape of pages in a book and the proportions of playing cards. Humans are just programmed to find the ratios attractive. For our purposes, all that’s important to know is that our species deeply understands the ratios of the Fibonacci sequence. We know them in our bones.

The numbers in the Fibonacci sequence are far enough apart that we can easily tell the difference. It’s easy for people to come down on one side or the other. If one person estimates something as a five, and another as an eight, we can intuitively see the difference. But the difference between a five and a six? That’s pretty subtle, more than our brains can really register.

It’s fairly well-known in medicine that for patients to report they perceive an improvement in a symptom, it has to have been a greater than 65-percent improvement. Our minds don’t work in smooth increments. We’re better at perceiving jumps from one state to another—and not smooth jumps but jagged ones.

What using the Fibonacci sequence to calculate task size permits is estimates that don’t have to be 100 percent accurate. Nothing will be exactly a five or an eight or a thirteen, but using those numbers gives us a way to collect opinions on the size of a task where everyone is using roughly the same measuring stick, and in that way a consensus is formed.

Estimating as a group in this manner gives us a far more accurate estimate than we could come up with alone.

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