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question asked: May 23 '12, 4:56 p.m.
question was seen: 5,744 times
last updated: Jul 26 '12, 12:21 a.m.

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Milestone type and estimates

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Virginia Brown (93●3●39●41) | asked May 23 '12, 4:56 p.m.
retagged Jul 26 '12, 12:21 a.m. by Aradhya K (1.4k●5●43●45)
We copies the milestone and issue type from the formal template into scrum

I have a sprint plan with two items:
story, that has been sized
a milestone

The progress bar shows that I have estimated only 50% of my work items.

This is true, but unfair, since milestones are never estimated. The same behavior happens for issues.

I notice that milestone include attributes for estimate and actual, presumably to facilitate morphing a work item into some other type. I thought of deleting the estimate attribute and removing the type field presentation, but it looks like (through the GUI) I can only delete custom fields that I've added. Nor does it look like I can set a default for a duration type.

Any advice here? We could leave issues and milestones in the backlog -- and that might be the answer -- but it would be nice to at least see issues in-line with the in-progress plan.


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Aradhya K (1.4k●5●43●45) | answered Jul 25 '12, 10:59 p.m.
JAZZ DEVELOPER
 Hi Virginia

The solution is simple for your problem. In plan we have the concept of Plan Item and Execution Item.
If you do not want to estimate a work item in the duration then mark that as the Plan Item. This can be set from the Eclipse client only.
Open the project area in the Eclipse client, switch to process configuration tab. On the tree navigate to Process Configuration --> Configuration Data --> Planning --> Work Item Type Configuration. 
In the out of the box template we have marked the Bussiness Need and Project Change Request as the plan items.

More information about this can be found in 
https://jazz.net/library/article/593. I have pasted the definitions of it here just for the reference. Do mark the work item types for which the work is not done in hours or not billed as the plan items.

Plan Item vs. Execution Item

Conceptually planning distinguishes between two types of work items: Plan Items and Execution Items. Work items of both types are shown on plans, but their defaults and presentation differs. So what makes these types different?

Plan Items
Such work items are used for higher level planning. A typical example for a plan item in the agile space are Stories and Epics. Typical for plan items is that they are not estimated in real time (hours) but in an abstract notion like Story Points, T-Shirt sizes, Gummy bears, etc.
Execution Items
An Execution Item is a small piece of work like a Task or Defect. Often, execution items are the result of breaking down Plan Items into 'executable' chunks of work. They typically can be estimated in hours and are assigned to a person in the team. When looking at it as a tree, plan items are roots and execution items are leaves.
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Millard Ellingsworth (2.5k●1●24●31) | answered May 23 '12, 9:46 p.m.
FORUM ADMINISTRATOR / JAZZ DEVELOPER
We copies the milestone and issue type from the formal template into scrum

I have a sprint plan with two items:
story, that has been sized
a milestone

The progress bar shows that I have estimated only 50% of my work items.

This is true, but unfair, since milestones are never estimated. The same behavior happens for issues.

I notice that milestone include attributes for estimate and actual, presumably to facilitate morphing a work item into some other type. I thought of deleting the estimate attribute and removing the type field presentation, but it looks like (through the GUI) I can only delete custom fields that I've added. Nor does it look like I can set a default for a duration type.

Any advice here? We could leave issues and milestones in the backlog -- and that might be the answer -- but it would be nice to at least see issues in-line with the in-progress plan.


For starters, I tested this with a Formal template and got similar results. At least in the Formal template presentations, you can't even enter estimates for milestones and issues if you wanted to. That should not count against your quality of planning and I have created an Enhancement to track this: https://jazz.net/jazz/web/projects/Rational%20Team%20Concert#action=com.ibm.team.workitem.viewWorkItem&id=212911 Please add yourself as a subscriber if you want to track this and add comments if you wish.

In the case of reusing these items from the Formal template in a Scrum project, I'm less clear what the supported behavior should be (the scheduling mechanisms are different, though I would hope a similar result could be accommodated).

I also don't see a way to add a default Duration for the Estimate -- and even if you could, I'm not sure a value of 0 would be counted as an estimate.

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