Tracking Progress for Agile Teams
Hi,
We have loaded the Agile With Discipline Templates provided by the IBM Rational Knowledge Community.
In this project Stories are tracked by story points and Tasks (we renamed from Action) are tracked by hours (Estimate, Correction, Time Spent). We are using the planning functionality, in an Iteration plan, taskboard view, which displays work items as stickies. In this view you can hover over a sticky and select the "Effort Tracking" twisty to change the "Time Spent" property.
Our scrum master would like to stay away from using hours to track progress on tasks. She would like to see a percentage complete, not related to hours or points.
So far I have added a new property called "% Complete", created an associated enumeration with values of 0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, 100% and added this to the Task work item type.
She would like to take this one step further and replace the twisty on the sticky in the taskboard view with the new property I created.
Two questions:
1) Thinking of the Agile approach would anyone recommend a different way of tracking progress at the task level?
2) Assuming we keep this approach, is there a way to change the behavior of the sticky to support my new property?
Thanks in advance.
One answer
1) If you use Scrum, how do you calculate your burndown chart using Percent Complete? Do you use Estimate/Corrected Estimate and percent complete to approximate the remaining hours? "Classic Scrum" uses an estimate (Hours Remaining before the task starts) with an update of Hours Remaining once the task is started. This makes math on the collection of tasks possible to see if you are likely to complete the committed work. Unless you are using an attribute customization to populate Time Remaining (or Time Spent), RTC's built in burndown reports are not going to work for you. Caveat: I'm not familiar with the template you are using, perhaps such calculations are built in?
2) The contents of the Taskboard cards is not yet configurable. This feature is in the backlog and tentatively planned for later this year (obviously a forward-looking statement that should not be construed as a commitment).