Budgeting efforts of complete projects - how to?

[Hans-Hermann Hunfeld]

Hi all,

trying to get my project ready for monthly reporting i m again annoyed about my actual workflow!

In our company we have to estimate the overall efforts in front of a project, based on a 80% backlog of user stories or other known requirements. As these projects are normally quite big (> 1000 MDs) we split them up in several epics which are more or less technical driven (GUI, logical layer, database etc.) as we feel better to evaluate this instead of approx. 100 user stories. For sure we estimate the user stories also in story points, but the team is often mixed up (external support e.g.) and therefor the velocity is no valid estimation (but used to double check when the velocity is settled).

Finally, there is an estimated effort on a high level and this effort has to be tracked during the project and also be visible in the JIRA charts (remaining estimates burndown; the green line), this has to be done in the early beginning of a project!

Right now we re estimating our sprint effort before each sprint very detailed, afterwards the project lead takes this values, does a summary on epic level and substracts it from the actual remaining effort of the according "budget epic".

Is there a way to do this in a way the system can support? All this stuff is done manually, what i m looking for is perhaps a workflow where the effort will be substracted from a parent by adding a subtask.

What do you think, how do you handle this?

Best regards,

Hans-Hermann

[boardtc]

Yes, you are right my previous answer was not for GH6. In that case you can get the same from the Velocity chart - https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/GH/Viewing+the+Velocity+Chart

[Hans-Hermann Hunfeld]

Unfortunately all comments do not cover the "budget" question. The only way i actually know is to evaluate all stories in story points and use the burndown chart to get an idea when a release/project is finished.

Maybe some kind of effort budget can be added in JIRA? Perhaps like an "epic baseline" which means to create some epics and enter an effort budget, after baselining it the system compares the effort spent towards this baseline? This would help many customers which are not completely moved to agile processes...

[boardtc]

You can add a request to the Atlasian issue tracker https://jira.atlassian.com, select GreenHopper and story.

[boardtc]

Have you considered organising your backlog and versions hierarchically. From the GreenHopper help - "If the selected version is a Parent version version, you can see the burndown chart of this version grouped by children. For example a Release burndown by 'Sprints'"

So that way you can see what how your release is burned down and what is left in terms of story points.

[Hans-Hermann Hunfeld]

Hi boardtc,

thanks for your reply!

AFAIR this function is provided in the classic board which will be switched of in the next couple of weeks/months, so this might be not an option for the future!?

Furthermore i want to track based on remaining efforts and not on story points (we use them for a cross check)...

Any other ideas?

Cheers,

Hans-Hermann