Burdown using Task Work Remaining Totals

[Liz]

Thanks for getting the Bug Management Tracking in this last release, and the improved integration with TFS.  As I've been digging into your Agile Tool, I've been discovering some underlying expected behavior.  I've used both Rally, and VersionOne at other development shops, and your tool is very promising as it's built upon.  So I'm providing some feedback for additional improvements.

On the Dashboard, it looks like the Iteration Burndown is using the Story Estimates.
The Points or "Estimate" should be used to calculate the Velocity, by how many stories are completed in the sprint.
There should be a calculation at the story level showing the Sum of the Original Estimate, Sum of the Work Remaining, and Sum of the Actual Work.

• This way, you can have a history of the estimates, and start to learn on what Estimates were correct, too high, or too low.
• The total Original Estimate is used for the amount of work to Burndown
• The total Work Remaining shows where you are at in the sprint, and how much is left to accomplish.

When points are used for the burndown, it's hard to get an idea of how close you are at completing the sprint, or if you are on track.  The entire sprint could be a flat line, then drop the last day or two.

Looking forward to your future plans. :)
      -Liz

[Steve]

Hello Liz,

Thank you very much for your feedback. Allowing users to customize how their burndown is calculated is in our product backlog. Keep an eye out for it in a future release.

We did intentionally choose to implement our burndown in this manner so that teams wouldn't get a false sense of progress. Often, hourly based burndowns hide the fact that your team is not getting stories Done. We've seen teams have a great looking hourly burndown that communicate that they're almost going to hit their deadline, only to find out that they've delivered zero completed stories because they've left all of their testing tasks until the very end.

That being said, allowing teams to choose how they want to do it is the best solution in the long run and we'll try to give people that option in the future.

Again, thanks for your feedback!

Greetings,
Steve
the Telerik team

[Fleur]

Hello Teampulse guys and girls,

I have the same problem as Liz. Because the different stories are not fully completed, it looks like we didnot  finish anything... I cannot get a feeling of our progress untill the stories are getting completely done.
I understand from your reply that you are thinking of making it customizable how the burndown is calculated.

It can also be an idea to make a report that shows the burndown, based on the tasks that are partially or completely done.
It is probably less work to make one extra report, that gives us the information we want.

regards,

Fleur

[Ryan]

Hello Fleur,

Thanks for the feedback. Your right, it may be better to have a different report that displays Task progress (or burndown) rather than adjusting the Story burndown calculation. This way you could use both reports and get 2 different perspectives.  We will consider this for the future. 

All the best,
Ryan
the Telerik team