USING WORK ESTIMATES
Work estimates allow you to accurately plan and track progress of your SCRUM sprint. Every note on the virtual task board at TangyOrange can store the amount of completed and remaining work associated with the work item, as suggested by the note template:
A scrumboard note contains three fields where text can be entered. The main area holds the description of the work item. The two fields below store work estimates. The left field, marked as "[done]" on the template above, contains the amount of work that has been completed. The other field, marked as "[left]", contains the amount of work that remains to be done. For example, the note below represent a work item on which 1 hour has already need spent, and an estimated 2.5 hours of work remain:
You can decide what unit of time you want to use for work estimates as long as the same unit is used consistently across all notes on your scrumboard. Typically work item estimates in SCRUM are expressed in hours. When SCRUM is used for managing software development projects, a good practice is to keep the granularity of every work item below 8 hours to enable more accurate estimates and more granular tracking.
Work estimates are normally updated during daily SCRUM meetings. However, nothing prevents team members from updating their estimates or status at any point in time.
Online scrumboard at TangyOrange does not require work estimates to be specified or maintained throughout a sprint. However, doing so enables automatic generation of a burndown chart, which is a powerful tool for tracking the progress and health of a sprint.
Maintaining up to date work estimates throughout the sprint enables automatic generation of a burndown chart, which is a powerful sprint reporting tool.
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