The easiest way to work with such numbers is to use excel, you can just press “Open in Microsoft Office” –> “Open Query in Microsoft Excel” to open in excel the query of the current iteration, or a query that comprehend all task for all past iterations, now you can simply add a column to calculate the difference between the Original Estimate and the Completed fields.įigure 4: Create a simple column with a formula that subtracts Completed Work from the Original Estimate When all task are completed you have zero on each Remaining field and you can do calculation based on Original Estimate and Completed work. Such an information is useful only for management, it is interesting to know who is better in estimating, or areas where the team is usually bad in estimating especially to avoid making same mistake in the future. This is good because this kind of information is not suitable to be visible to all the team, because the Task Board purpose is not to put shame on team members, showing how good/bad a developer is in estimating task, it serves also the need to understand how many work remained and the various status of each task. Now you know that the task was underestimated, simply because you told that it would need 12 hours to be completed, but it requested 16 hours this information is not reflected in the Task Board, where only remaining works is represented. Next day you work for another 4 hours to the task and close it, now you can write zero in the remaining and 16 in the completed. You should write down 2 in the Remaining and 12 into completed. Now you continue to work on the task, the following day you work for 7 hours on it, but at the end of the day you verify that you should do more work, and you estimate it to need 2 hours more. The simplest thing to do is adding number of worked hours to Completed field and estimating number of hours remaining, nothing else. The purpose of time tracking is understanding if a task was completed on time. This change is reflected in the Remaining field, and you should also write down in completed work field the real amount of work you did, in this example the number 5. If you think that is difficult to understand if you did more on less than half the work lets depict a more standard scenario: you worked for 5 hours to the project so you change remaining work from 12 to 7 to reflect this simple fact.įigure 3: Changing value on the taskboard affects the Remaining work. You can change values directly from the task board, suppose you are working at the “*update database to point to actual images”*task, you worked for the whole day (8 hours) on it but a the end you estimate that you need other 7 hours of work, because you did less than half the work. If you open the Task Board you can find the Remaining work represented as number in bold in each task card.įigure 2: Task Board showing active tasks and remaining work for each of them. The Original Estimate should never change and developers should track down work using the other two fields. If you look at the sample data in Brian Keller’s virtual machine for Project Tailspin Toys you have three field related to estimation of task, as visible in Figure 1.įigure 1: The three field of MSF For Agile that are used to track estimation and work done on taskĪs you can see the field Original Estimate is used to do an initial estimation of hours needed to accomplish a task, while Remainingand Completedwork are used to track progress. One of the information requested by Project Managers is knowing how good was task estimation in the past, and thanks to TFS gathering this data is really simple.
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