[GaboonViper]

I think you might be right about the task burnup chart. And perhaps the weighting isn’t really as necessary as I thought, as bigger stories tend to have more tasks anyway. I’m gonna try it for a while, see how it works out.

Thanks.

Cheers,
Boyd

[GaboonViper]

Sorry, I didn’t mean to come across as harsh as I did. I’m afraid I was a little hasty with my reply.

We of course do things like the daily standup meetings and stuff, I’m not interested in discussing that. I understand your concern about it, but I’m talking about hypothetical situations or experience from the past. If we’re doing things wrong, then no tool is going to help us anyway. But if we’re doing things right, a tool can make it easier.

The proposal I made, it’s close to the kinds of charts I’ve used in the past. Transparency, communication, collaboration are of course important, but we’re all still human and we tend to be influenced by our emotions. No one likes to admit they are behind schedule, so we tend to be overly optimistic about our chances. But if we’re looking at a chart that objectively shows we’re probably not going to make it, it’ll help us do something about it. Like informing the stakeholders and discussing the removal or perhaps even the addition of stories. It also means we won’t be disappointed at the end of the sprint if we didn’t make, preventing a drop in moral.

So let me explain the issues I have with the available options.

– ‘remaining time burn down chart’ is not an option as we don’t estimate remaining time for tasks
– ‘story burn up chart’ is pretty much useless because a story of 1 point is equal to a story of 8 points.
– ‘task burn up chart’ is a contender, but it’s problematic because some tasks belong to big stories and some to small ones. For big stories the tasks tend to be bigger. And as I said we tend to be loose with task creation and removal. This may change as we get more experience, but that’s the case at the moment.
– ‘point burn up’ is very tricky especially at the end as most team members are generally still finishing up their last story.

You’ve proposed the task board, but when you have 20+ stories every sprint, it’s difficult to use as an overview. Aside from that it pretty much has the same problems as the ‘task burn up chart’, as in not all tasks are equal.

That’s why I did the proposal. I’m not looking for help. I’m not expecting you to implement what I proposed, though it would be cool. I just want to make sure you understand why I think this is a useful feature. And I figured I couldn’t be the only one to think this.

Thanks for your time.

Cheers,
Boyd.

[GaboonViper]

So you’re saying if I wan’t to know the progress of my team, I should either:
– Tell my team to estimate every single task. Even if I was inclined to give them this administrative burden, that means all story point estimates have just become useless.
– Use the story point chart and pray that if there are still 4 stories in development near the end, they’ll get finished in time.

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