Track Actual worked hours

Scrum for Team System - Feature Suggestions

Track Actual worked hours

gabriel.lozano-moran 03-22-2007, 9:21
As a Project Manager I want to track, beside the Estimated Effort and the Remaing Work, the actual hours spent on PBI's for reporting.

As a Technical Lead I want to track, beside the Estimated Effort and the Remaining Work, the actual hours spent on SBI's, to improve our estimation skills. With other words now we can not see how far off or close our estimates were compared to the actual hours spent on SBI's.

So basically this field is exactly like the Remaining Work field. Except that this field should be named "Completed Work". This field should exist in the PBI's and SBI's. In the PBI's this field should be read-only and be the sum of all the "Completed Work" of the SBI's.

Re: Track Actual worked hours

Conchango 03-29-2007, 3:16

This feature request is not applicable as it interferes with basic Scrum framework rules. Work remaining is the only metric tracked against a team. Please see the Process guidance for further reference.

Re: Track Actual worked hours

sherlock 03-30-2007, 3:20
I would like something more basic. I want my team to enter actual hours worked on a task each day and have the template subtract these hours from Estimated Effort to provide Hours Remaining. This is in line with scrum principles.

Re: Track Actual worked hours

gabriel.lozano-moran 03-30-2007, 3:48
It is true that in SCRUM there is no time-tracking but somewhere in the book there is a mention that estimations can be improved after several sprints but how can be improve this if we don't track this? And no I do not want to use Excel for this.

Re: Track Actual worked hours

pos1 05-04-2007, 8:47

If you can't track actuals, how do you figure out your velocity for future sprint planning? It's not enough to simply say we met our goal by getting all the stories completed. What if it took you twice as long as originally estimated and your development staff put in 80 hours weeks for the entire sprint? Without collecting that data, you'd be obligated to use the same velocity for future sprints with severe consequences.

What's remaining is the key statistic during a sprint. What it took you to complete your sprint goal is what's key for sprint planning.

Re: Track Actual worked hours

mdw_cubed 07-11-2007, 12:33
My understanding with SCRUM is that the development team perform the estimation and so take into account time taken to achieve tasks in the previous Sprints to refine the estimation.

In practice, for me, this is proving a difficult to achieve. As a result I have thought about modifying the template to record the additional fields as mentioned in a Joel post http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000245.html

I noticed someone else had already done this and posted on these forums, I just haven't managed to look into how to do it myself.

It would be great if the template could do it as an aside to the SCRUM process, but I guess this is a SCRUM template and if recording actuals and elasped to achieve the SBI aren't a part of SCRUM it will be difficult to justify their addition.

Re: Track Actual worked hours

sspotts 03-12-2008, 6:24
I'm running into an issue with this because of business unit and organizational chargeback. Our timekeeping system requires that we track work done per job code, per task type (dev, analysis, docs, mtgs, etc.) per day. I'd like to shield the team from having to do manual entry on the time keeping system. If I can get the data from TFS, it would be much easier on them. Persuant to the Tao of Scrum, team productivity would be increased because the impediment of time wasted reporting time is removed ;).

Re: Track Actual worked hours

DylanSmith 05-22-2008, 7:01

I have effectively achieved tracking actual time using the SFTS template through appropriate use of the Estimated Effort and Work Remaining fields. The idea is that if you want to enter X hours of actual time against a SBI you have to decrease the Work Remaining by Y and/or increase the Estimated Effort by Z such that Y+Z == X.

For example, lets say I had an SBI with an Estimated Effort (EE) of 5 hours, and a Work Remaining (WR) of 5 hours.

Day 1: Actual time spent on SBI is 3 hours. Change WR to 2. (Y = 3, Z = 0, Y+Z = 3).

Day 2: Actual time spent on SBI is 3 more hours, and I'm still not complete, probably about 1.5 hours remaining still on this SBI. Change WR to 1.5, Change EE to 7.5 (Y = 0.5, Z = 2.5, Y+Z = 3).

Using this method I can report on actual time, it is simply EE - WR.

Re: Track Actual worked hours

Scrummaster 09-08-2008, 4:20
I do not quite understand why it would be against SCRUM rules to track the actual hours (or any other unit denomination)??
I find it an absolute necessity to track actual efforts, as there are in most projects instances where an initial estimation is overrun by actual efforts (Ex. Estimation: 8 hrs; Actual Effort: 12 hrs; Work remaining: 0 hrs). I would like to know what the reasons were for such an increase, as these might relate to unclear specifications, technical impediments etc etc. If I do not see that more time was consumed, then I will not be in a position to remove potential blockage, and hence not be able to help my team...

So again my question: Will you include this as a feature, or must I implement this "on my own" ?
ty
joe

Re: Track Actual worked hours

RSystems 10-15-2008, 3:29
Maybe actuals aren't technically part of the SCRUM process, but it is still something that definitely needs to be tracked. As other posters have mentioned, it is a big part of the "empirical" aspect of SCRUM.

We have added a field so the actual hours can be specified for each SBI, which of course is only available in VSTS and not Task Board. Even with the field, though, it is still pretty clunky.

It would be much better to have actuals documented as individual records, with these records associated with a SBI. So, you could look at a SBI and not only see that it has 12 hours of actuals, but also that Jane the developer documented 4 hours on 10/1/08 at 10:31 AM, then documented 4 more hours on 10/2/08 at 8:11 AM, and Tom the tester documented 4 hours on 10/2/08 at 5:02 PM.

This is especially helpful to ensure accuracy from the people documenting the actuals. When I see a SBI with 10 hours, I may think, "I know I spent 2 hours on this a couple of days ago, but did I remember to document that?". If the individual records were there, I could easily see that I did.

Re: Track Actual worked hours

MadPeter 11-05-2008, 8:06

Hi I have been responsible in my company to set up team foundation server and have been using the Scrum templates now for a few pilot projects. During the presentation of the project to the management team they asked where they can see the actual hours in regard to the estimated and remaining hours. When they realized that Actual Hours were not being tracked it was a management show stopper. I have been instructed to either implement a field to allow the developers to add their Actual hours or change templates.

Has anyone added such functionality to the scrum templates and if so can they give me some hints on how they did this and the efforts involved ? I would much rather keep using the scrum templates then changing now to another set of templates. We do not need to include the Actual in any reports just to have some field to store the value and to help with our estimations in future sprints.

Re: Track Actual worked hours

shatchard 11-10-2008, 11:18
I can understand that this functionality is something which is does not fit in the the scrum guidelines - but it is something that it seems a lot of people working with this methodology seem to feel is very important - myself included.

The issue is mainly that the estimation is not always accurate and it is important - and from a project administration perspective it is very useful to measure.

I just feel that rather than everyone going away and performing their own implementation in different ways it would be useful to try and establish a best practice way of implementing this functionality.

One possible solution I had was to add a SBI field which stores the baseline value for estimated effort when then the item is estimated - this would mean that we would be able to change the estimated effort field during the sprint and would have a value to compare back to within reports.

Although this may not be something which falls under a feature request as the framework may not want to be 'muddied' with this kind of functionality - as the experts on scrum I dont know if suggesting a possible way of doing this would be something you would consider doing?

Betreft: Re: Track Actual worked hours

gabriel.lozano-moran 11-12-2008, 9:13
I guess that at this point it is clear that a lot of people want this feature :)

Track Actual worked hours

Matt W 11-13-2008, 6:47
While I realize that time spent per task isn't really a part of Scrum, my organization bills by the hour so it is an absolute necessity that I be able to track this information for my team. Right now, i'm having to use a combination of Scrum for Team System and a separate Excel spreadsheet which is a pain. If I could track all of this using the same tool it would be a godsend.

Has there been any progress on making this a feature? Or will this not be happening at all? In which case we'll just need to implement it ourselves in the near term.

-Matt Whited.

Re: Track Actual worked hours

Haemoglobin 12-01-2008, 4:00
If you have a separate timesheeting system (which is typically the case from places I have worked so far), is it not possible to see how many hours the team spent on sprint tasks overall? From there, can't you get an *average* variance between estimated and actuals for the team and use this for future velocity planning?

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