Using Actuals to Refine Task Estimating for New/Young Agile Teams

Products

• Rally On-Premise
• Rally SaaS

Issue/Introduction

Users have a need to see the Actuals for the development time so the team can compare the estimates to those Actuals and learn from the retrospective on the data. How does one go about enabling Actuals in Rally?

 

Resolution

WARNING: this is a temporary process to refine the team's ability to estimate. Once the estimates are in line, administrators should turn Actuals off.

In order to make the Actuals field visible, a Workspace or Subscription Administrator needs to take the following steps:

1. Click Setup
2. Click Workspaces and Projects
3. Click the appropriate workspace
4. Click Fields from the navigation pane to the left
5. Click Task from the work item drop down
6. Click the gear icon next to the Actuals field to edit
7. Set Visible to Yes
8. Click Save & Close
9. Select User Story from the work item drop-down
10. Click the gear icon next to Task Actual Totals to edit
11. Set Visible to Yes
12. Click Save & Close
13. Repeat this process on Defect for Task Actual Totals if you use defects/task them out. This will enable the necessary fields for proper capturing and reporting of Actuals on your tasks.

Planning with Velocity and Capacity at the Same Time

One report that may be helpful is the Weekly Actuals Report. Additionally, users can now expose Actuals on the Iteration Status Page.

Users can now track the capacity of team members using the Team Status Page. This is where your team members can enter the number of hours they have for a specific Iteration. This then allows the user to track the team's capacity during sprint planning, when stories are tasked out.

Users would be best guided to use the Team Planning page to build out the Iteration and realize backlogs. When it comes to tasking User Stories out during planning users can do so on the Team Planning page now. If tracking the team capacity is important to help the team stay in bounds of the time they do have; then it's sometimes recommended to create a Custom Page on the Plan tab and add a few helpful apps. For instance, add in the Iteration Planning Board and this Team Capacity app (this is a custom app and was not developed by CA Agile Central and as such is not fully supported by Rally). You'll need to copy the code of the Team Capacity app and load it into the Custom HTML app.