Question

When a developer is working on a case that has been given a time estimate of X hours and that case for one reason or another is going to take longer, is the best practice to adjust the estimated time or should s/he leave it alone?

Also should the developer create new cases for this extra work or edit the existing case with new scope and notes?

Thanks for your time, Ken

Answer 1

Best practice is to always update the estimate to be what you think the truth is.

FB was designed with exactly this idea in mind.

• EBS uses Original Estimate. People shouldn't really care about the Original Estimate.
• People should care about the Current Estimate. This is based off of the best information the developer has now. As a team member, you're going to want to know that the developer's 2 hours task is looking more like a 6 hour task.

With regard to how much of a change in the estimate requires an update; that's really up for the team to establish.

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Right now, the decision to open a new case depends on your environment:

• Opening a new case gives you better metrics, clearer detail of the work, more control of the project overall. However, this undermines EBS because EBS doesn't know that the new task is really part of the old task.
• If you want really good EBS, you should continue to use the original case. Of course, fixing a "bug" on a "feature" case will be incredibly hard to see, etc. Basically, you'll lose a lot of the visibility of the work but you'll have great EBS.

The PM should work with the team to find the best balance. Hopefully, we'll have a way of grouping cases together in the future so EBS can see that Bug2 and Feature1 were really part of the same initial task/estimate so we can see things clearly and EBS can forecast accurately.

Answer 2

I say go ahead and adjust that time estimate as you see fit. This can help both you and coworkers on the same page with what is left.

When the work itself is considerably different (e.g. scope creep or something), a new (sub-)case could be created. For larger items, I typically will create a sub-case for different aspects of the work, such as the actual implementation, design time, particular component implementation, or research. Use of sub-cases is a judgement call and we try to not create extraneous ones.

FYI, for purposes of the EBS with how well you estimate, only the original estimate is used.