Assembla tickets now include a new field for tracking the total estimated work for a ticket. You can use this information on the Agile Planner, Milestones, list reports, and Burndown chart. This article will explain how to turn on Assembla’s new estimating features and try them out.
Turn on estimates:
By default, estimates are turned off. We didn’t want to make the system more complicated for the majority of users that don’t do estimating. To turn estimating on, go to Tickets/Settings, scroll to the bottom, and find the panel for “Estimation”. Choose from three estimating metrics:
1) Time: Enter your estimates as hours or days.
2) Points: Points don’t have any predefined units, and you learn through observation how many points fit into an iteration.
3) Size (Small / Medium / Large): These three choices make it easier and faster to enter estimates and are almost as accurate as more detailed estimates. On the Agile Planner you can see them graphically as bars. Internally we represent these as 1, 3, and 9 points.
Once enabled, you will see a new “Estimate” field on your tickets.
How to enter estimates:
- Create/edit a ticket and enter an estimate in the field.
- Using the Agile Planner view, you can edit estimates on the ticket lines by clicking on the current estimate.
Ways to use estimates:
Planning Milestones and Scrum Iterations
On the Agile Planner, you can open milestones in the milestones column and edit the estimates for each ticket in the milestone or iteration. You will see a sum for the milestone or iteration on the milestone bar.
Sizing Features
You can use the Agile Planner to move tickets into the Story/Feature column, and then add subtasks. The Agile Planner will show you the total work estimate for each top level Story or Feature.
Monitoring Capacity of a Kanban Column
On top of each column in the Cardwall view you will see two numbers representing the ticket count and the sum of estimates. This helps you to run a traditional Kanban process where you control the amount of work in each column. For example, if you see a lot of tasks or a lot of points in the “test” column, you might slow down development and ask some developers to work on testing. This prevents work from getting stuck “in inventory” and maximizes the speed of completing work.
Seeing Burndown Progress
You can now display a Burndown chart that shows the total estimate for remaining open tickets.
Reporting
In the list of filters, you can now show fields for estimate, work remaining, and work invested. You can export this data to spreadsheets to compare estimated to actual.
You can also show the sum of child estimates and sum of child work remaining. These show the total estimate and work remaining for stories/features that incudes the sum of the parent ticket and all associated "child" tickets.
TODO – some things we are working on for the next release
- For each milestone, display the total estimates and time invested
- Allow entering of estimates from the ticket popup menu
- Show estimates on the cardwall cards
Three ways to track work
We now have three ways of looking at a quantity of work: estimate, time invested, estimated work remaining.
Time invested is the historical sum of the hours that you entered. We keep this data as it is entered on the time sheet. With the most recent enhancements, we report on it by milestone and by story/feature/parent ticket.
Estimated work remaining is the amount of time that you think you will need to complete a task, which should be reduced as you work on the task. For several years, we have provided a place to enter this data and used it on a Burndown chart. It’s useful on a Burndown chart, but it changes all the time so it’s not useful if you want to calculate velocity – the total amount of estimated work completed in a milestone. For this, you need the new feature for total estimates. Work remaining is also harder to maintain because it should change all of the time, so we are moving away from the “work remaining” to the new “total estimate.”
In the past, I have argued that developers should focus on prioritizing rather than estimating. If you prioritize tasks and perform them in the order of importance, estimates don't actually change your actions or the results. So in some situations, estimating is a waste of time. But scrum and other methodologies incorporate estimating, and it is often needed for budgeting. We will support you in your use of estimates, and we will provide an increasing level of support for estimate-based methodologies.