SEE ALSO:
- Completed and Remaining Effort
- Time Tracking
- Calculation of Team Iteration progress
- Reports on Effort in Team Iterations
- Report for total completed Effort / Velocity
- Actual Time Spent vs Estimated Effort comparison report
- Metrics for Bugs in User Stories and Features
- How is Progress calculated for work items: User Stories, Tasks, Bugs, Requests
Brief summary of this article:
Q: We estimate User Stories. When the Story is estimated the sum of Time Spent underneath it should not exceed its Effort.
A: In Targetprocess it is not possible to introduce rigid limits for Time Spent totals. However it is possible to input and track estimations. Whenever needed it is possible to compare estimations and actual total time spent and configure visual warnings when the limits are exceed. The following features may serve as a solution:
- With Customized cards and customized columns in lists for every work item you can see its total effort and total time spent and number of child entities
- Tabular Reports help to export lists of entities with these values. Inner lists of child entities that provide extra details are supported as well
- Visual Reports and Custom Graphical reports allow you to create filtered and customized charts with entities and embed them to dashboards
- Visual Encoding on your views helps to highlight cards when sum of time spent exceeds the effort
Estimation accuracy may be tracked on different levels of your hierarchy: from work items (such as User Stories, Bugs) to larger planning entities (Features, Epics, Sprints / Iterations, Releases and Projects).
Comparison of estimated Effort and actual Time Spent makes more sense when estimates are made in ideal hours and not in abstract points. More infromation: Effort in Targetprocess
Views for comparison of effort and time spent for work items
Every User Story has two separate fields:
- Effort. It is calculated as total effort hours of the story and all its tasks.
- Time Spent. Value to this field is provided automatically. It is calculated as total spent hours of all time records under the story and its tasks.
We'll compare Effort and Time Spent in the Visual encoding rule or in Advanced Filter.
Compare effort and time spent using Visual encoding
We will create a list that will show all User Stories. It will compare effort of a User Story and sum of time spent records. And we'll apply color highlighting when total time spent exceeds effort.
Create a list view that shows User Stories as rows (cards).
Set up the following visual encoding rule with red color:
?Effort < TimeSpent
Finish setup of the view. Whenever an effort of a User Story is less than a sum of time spent records the User Story is colored into red.
Filter out entities with exhausted Time Spent
We will create a list that will show User Stories. It will compare effort of a User Story and sum of time spent records. And we'll show only entities where total time spent exceeds effort.
Create a list view that shows User Stories as rows (cards).
Set up the following Filter:
?Effort < TimeSpent
Finish setup of the view. Whenever an effort of a User Story is less than a sum of time spent records the User Story is shown, otherwise it is hidden.
Further customization
For additional visibility, on the Customize Cards tab, configure columns for your list view. Add Effort, Time spent/time remaining and Open/total Tasks columns.
Calculate and display ratio between Effort and Time Spent
Custom metrics can be configured to calculate ratio or percentage between Effort and Time Spent for your work items. Calculated values can be added to views using Customize Cards, used for highlighting with Visual Encoding, included to Visual Reports and exported when needed.
See Also
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