Guidelines on updating efforts spent & efforts remaining on tasks
One question constantly asked by engineers is guideline for updating efforts remaining. Let's say, we estimated task for 10 hours. The engineer completed 5 hours and after that he/she feels the tasks needs 10 more hours (which means new estimate is now 15 hours). How does the engineer update that in the tasks ? Task does not allow u to enter 10 as efforts remaining as it goes into negative. At same time, you can't use correction field as report does not show correct time spent on that.
What are the guidelines so that we are able to track original planned efforts and final actual efforts spent. This data is important to improve our estimation for similar tasks in future.
What are the guidelines so that we are able to track original planned efforts and final actual efforts spent. This data is important to improve our estimation for similar tasks in future.
3 answers
The intention is to use the correction field. This will update the effective estimate (which is basically the estimate if the correction doesn't exist, and correction otherwise).
Can you explain which report does not show that correctly? Is that an OOTB report? It seems to me the report is ill-designed and uses the estimate instead of the effective estimate.
Can you explain which report does not show that correctly? Is that an OOTB report? It seems to me the report is ill-designed and uses the estimate instead of the effective estimate.
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I agree with Piotr. If you run time remaining mode, you change the correction to the total amount you estimate but you have to also change the time remaining to the new corrected value.
With respect to reporting, you have to know what goes on behind the scenes though. I have looked into this pretty recently and it is quite interesting. The time remaining mode only changes the presentation and the math.
The Attributes used are actually the same as in the time spent mode (yes there are requests to change this).
The time spent field will always contain the time spent, which is
baseTime=(correctedEstimate>0)?correctedEstimate:Estimate;
timeSpent=timeRemainingMode?baseTime-timeRemaining:timeSpent;
All data is in milliseconds.
So you see 10 hours correctedEstimate and time remaining is 2 hours in the presentation and you get 8 hours in the time spent attribute.
I hope I got all my math right.....
With respect to reporting, you have to know what goes on behind the scenes though. I have looked into this pretty recently and it is quite interesting. The time remaining mode only changes the presentation and the math.
The Attributes used are actually the same as in the time spent mode (yes there are requests to change this).
The time spent field will always contain the time spent, which is
baseTime=(correctedEstimate>0)?correctedEstimate:Estimate;
timeSpent=timeRemainingMode?baseTime-timeRemaining:timeSpent;
All data is in milliseconds.
So you see 10 hours correctedEstimate and time remaining is 2 hours in the presentation and you get 8 hours in the time spent attribute.
I hope I got all my math right.....
From my point of view you should adjust the Corrected Estimate to reflect the new estimation. This becomes then the Effective Estimate.
If you do the adjustment of Effective Estimation within the Plan UI, by displaying the column the, the Time Remaining is increased and not the Time Spent. This is what you expect.
If you do the adjustment in the Work item Editor, the Time Spent is increased. That means you have there also to set the new Time Remaining.
Unfortunatly the Work Item Editor and the Plan Editor are not behaving the same way.
We filed a defect against this.
(But it does not look like anybody of IBM is interest in this defect. There is no comments, nor any change of any field in this defect since 1.Mar.2013. Maybe you can also give some comments there)