In the last blog post we outlined the Burndown Chart and how it helps with analysing the performance of your Sprints. Now we're going to be discussing Time and Effort estimation and how it can be configured and used for estimating the required effort necessary to ensure a given Sprint is completed on time.
Estimation Units
When you set up your project, you'll be given two options for the estimation units - story points, or time in hours and minutes.
Story points are part of the SCRUM development methodology we discussed in the previous post, and are designed as a more universal effort estimation unit that might be used across different environments and time zones, where working hours may vary. They can't be directly compared to time, so it's up to the individual team to decide how much "effort" a single Story Point actually equates to.
To help with this, Codebase allows you to choose from a list of common estimation strategies, as well as create your own custom strategy. You can change this at any time in your project’s properties, under the ticket methodology section.
Hours and minutes are more self-explanatory and might be preferable if you're more comfortable with them over Story Points. The estimation method will respect your settings when calculating total duration in days; just head to your Time tab and enter your working hours in the top-right corner.
Velocity Metrics
Once you've set your estimation units, you can choose how you want Codebase to calculate performance within your Sprints.
You have two options, Time and Effort, or the number of tickets completed. This can be set just below the Estimation Strategy in your project properties.
If you choose Time and Effort, your sprint performance will be calculated by looking at the total effort for all tickets and comparing it to the effort that was completed within the duration. Choosing tickets completed will compare your total tickets in the sprint with the amount completed within the duration.
Next time, we'll be looking at the Kanban Board, and how you can use it to monitor and plan your Sprints.
Please get in touch with us if you have any questions to support@codebasehq.com .
