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Scrum - stories and tasks


Anthony Kesterton (7.5k7180136) | asked Dec 07 '08, 5:39 p.m.
JAZZ DEVELOPER
Hi

I have been looking at the Scrum process template - and I don't quite understand how it works.

Story work items have story points and no time estimates. Tasks have time estimates. Stories should be broken into tasks (or have I misunderstood how Tasks work in the RTC Scrum process template)?

Where do you put an estimate of how long a story will take, and the actuals? Surely this is part of the story? Can you get the info from the linked tasks that form the story?

Any suggestions and explanations gratefully received

thanks

anthony

4 answers



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Johannes Rieken (1.2k1) | answered Dec 08 '08, 4:28 a.m.
kesterto wrote:
Hi

I have been looking at the Scrum process template - and I don't quite
understand how it works.

Story work items have story points and no time estimates. Tasks have
time estimates. Stories should be broken into tasks (or have I
misunderstood how Tasks work in the RTC Scrum process template)?

Stories don't have estimate because they usually describe work to be

done one a high level. Opposed to that, tasks describe actual work a
developer has to do. Usually, you start with a bunch of stories that you
have to estimate. But instead of real values, you'll use some abstract
notion, e.g. story points or t-shirt sizes. For instance, take the story
'support for setting preferences on the client'. Using abstract values
makes it easier to estimate as you just say 'XXL', or '4pts', or
'heavy'... instead of a concrete value like 4d3h32mins. Start with the
smallest/biggest story and assign it the little/big value, all other
stories relative to those.
In the second step the stories are split up into developers tasks which
are more concrete and detailed. Hence, it's easier to make an estimation
like 4hrs.

Where do you put an estimate of how long a story will take, and the
actuals? Surely this is part of the story? Can you get the info from
the linked tasks that form the story?

For stories, RTC shows progress information which accumulates the

estimates/actuals of its children. That allows you to see how much work
for a story has been done already. Further, there is a report 'Story
points per Iteration' which shows you how many story points your team
usually achieves in one iteration. This value helps you to plan an
iteration as you know how many stories from your backlog can be planned
for on iteration.
The following enhancement request might be interesting for you as well:
https://jazz.net/jazz/resource/itemName/com.ibm.team.workitem.WorkItem/65069

--
Cheers, Johannes
Agile Planning Team

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Anthony Kesterton (7.5k7180136) | answered Dec 08 '08, 6:28 a.m.
JAZZ DEVELOPER
Many thanks Johannes. This helps.

I expected to find this kind of info in the Scrum process templates docs - but I get directed to an unknown web page on my local machine in my installation of RTC. I suspect I don't have the offline docs installed - but have not had a chance to look at this.

anthony

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Millard Ellingsworth (2.5k12431) | answered Dec 08 '08, 1:00 p.m.
FORUM ADMINISTRATOR / JAZZ DEVELOPER
I expected to find this kind of info in the Scrum process templates docs - but I get directed to an unknown web page on my local machine in my installation of RTC.


I'm pretty sure that most of the Agile Estimating and Planning stuff, while often used with Scrum, isn't really part of Scrum (Scrum has a backlog, but it makes no rules for how you deal with it other than to prioritize it). Probably the best resource for understanding how this is intended to work is Mike Cohn's Agile Estimating and Planning (or the many interpretations you may find in various papers and blogs on the web). Mike's web site has a lot of great collateral (and I'm sure links to buy the book): http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/articles

HTH...Millard

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Anthony Kesterton (7.5k7180136) | answered Dec 08 '08, 4:38 p.m.
JAZZ DEVELOPER
Hi Millard

I will definitely take a look at that site too - thanks for the pointer.

The original question (perhaps clumsily worded) was about how the RTC template works but it would certainly help to better understand how it *should* work regardless of how RTC implements this stuff today.

My followup was that I may have found a problem when RTC can't find its help file - but let me confirm it really is a problem and not finger-trouble

regards

anthony

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