Since our inception, Sprint.ly has felt that time estimates are untenable in a fast moving product environment. Simply put, humans are not good at perceiving or estimating time. Computers, however, are generally quite good at such things.
Today we’re introducing a new feature, which we call Timelines, that we created to help your business understand two things:
- Based on previous team performance, how many days of work do you have in-progress and in your backlog.
- Based on task size and number of tasks, who on the team has too much (or too little) on their plate.
Sprint.ly has had estimates since we launched. The circles next to each item card default to unscored and you can estimate items by clicking on the circle and choosing how big or small of a task it is. Behind the scenes Sprint.ly’s computers are keeping track of how long tasks take and calculating a velocity for how much the team is getting done and how quickly. This velocity data is then surfaced in Timelines as dotted lines with an estimate of how many days of work will likely be needed to complete those tasks.
With the introduction of Timelines it’s going to be important that your team utilizes both the estimate feature and the Start, Stop, and Finish buttons (Tip: Our SCM integrations will click Start automatically for you on your first commit). Over time Sprint.ly will get better and better at learning your team’s productivity patterns and, in turn, get better at estimating.
Another important metric that Timelines clearly exposes is what we’ve been referring to internally as “team load.” The positive Y-axis is your team’s in-progress items and the negative Y-axis is the backlog. The X-axis is your team. Each item assigned to each person is shown as a stacked bar graph. Each item’s height is proportion to the size estimate given by the developer (e.g. Small tasks are small bars, while X-Large tasks are large bars). This allows managers to quickly gauge who on the team has excess capacity and who on the team has plenty to work on for now.
Timelines is one of a slew of features we’ve been planning to help teams, managers, and business operations affectively manage their resources and objectively manage their productivity. We hope you enjoy it.
Those not participating in our beta can check out this screenshot.
