Comments on: Why We Dropped Ideal Hours http://www.kfurlong.com/2009/11/18/why-we-dropped-ideal-hours/ A blog about agile development, quality management, business, and technology Tue, 01 Jun 2010 05:09:19 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 By: Emily http://www.kfurlong.com/2009/11/18/why-we-dropped-ideal-hours/comment-page-1/#comment-118 Emily Tue, 01 Jun 2010 05:09:19 +0000 http://www.kfurlong.com/?p=96#comment-118 Great post Ken. Thank you for sharing your experience. We've been looking at not using ideal hours for tasks anymore either as the overhead of tracking it all can get expensive, and once any management level person sees hours they immediately think set in stone, regardless. The point of ideal hours for tasks (as opposed to story points for stories) is to figure out if we have added more stories to the backlog then we really can do given the current hours the team can put in. Regardless, we all find out what works for us, and if removing ideal hours is working for you all and you can see the amount of working getting done, that's what counts. Great post Ken. Thank you for sharing your experience. We’ve been looking at not using ideal hours for tasks anymore either as the overhead of tracking it all can get expensive, and once any management level person sees hours they immediately think set in stone, regardless. The point of ideal hours for tasks (as opposed to story points for stories) is to figure out if we have added more stories to the backlog then we really can do given the current hours the team can put in. Regardless, we all find out what works for us, and if removing ideal hours is working for you all and you can see the amount of working getting done, that’s what counts.

]]> By: Ken Furlong http://www.kfurlong.com/2009/11/18/why-we-dropped-ideal-hours/comment-page-1/#comment-9 Ken Furlong Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:42:52 +0000 http://www.kfurlong.com/?p=96#comment-9 Thanks for the comment, Robert. You're absolutely right about task hours being intended for helping to know how much work put into a sprint, that was exactly what we were using them for. We just found that we could decide how much work to put in a sprint just as well using our velocity and a quick gut check from everyone on the team. The ideal hours didn't actually help us at all - each team is different, of course, and I can easily imagine scenarios where tasking out stories using ideal hours or some other time measurement helps a great deal. In any event, please let me know how it goes if you do decide to experiment with dropping ideal hours. :-) Thanks for the comment, Robert. You’re absolutely right about task hours being intended for helping to know how much work put into a sprint, that was exactly what we were using them for. We just found that we could decide how much work to put in a sprint just as well using our velocity and a quick gut check from everyone on the team. The ideal hours didn’t actually help us at all – each team is different, of course, and I can easily imagine scenarios where tasking out stories using ideal hours or some other time measurement helps a great deal.

In any event, please let me know how it goes if you do decide to experiment with dropping ideal hours. :-)

]]> By: Robert Dempsey http://www.kfurlong.com/2009/11/18/why-we-dropped-ideal-hours/comment-page-1/#comment-8 Robert Dempsey Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:15:54 +0000 http://www.kfurlong.com/?p=96#comment-8 Great post Ken. Thank you for sharing your experience. We've been looking at not using ideal hours for tasks anymore either as the overhead of tracking it all can get expensive, and once any management level person sees hours they immediately think set in stone, regardless. The point of ideal hours for tasks (as opposed to story points for stories) is to figure out if we have added more stories to the backlog then we really can do given the current hours the team can put in. Regardless, we all find out what works for us, and if removing ideal hours is working for you all and you can see the amount of working getting done, that's what counts. Great post Ken. Thank you for sharing your experience. We’ve been looking at not using ideal hours for tasks anymore either as the overhead of tracking it all can get expensive, and once any management level person sees hours they immediately think set in stone, regardless. The point of ideal hours for tasks (as opposed to story points for stories) is to figure out if we have added more stories to the backlog then we really can do given the current hours the team can put in. Regardless, we all find out what works for us, and if removing ideal hours is working for you all and you can see the amount of working getting done, that’s what counts.

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