Question

I've just seen this:

http://fogbugz.stackexchange.com/questions/186/how-can-i-work-on-non-development-tasks-that-have-no-estimate

..which suggests I cannot just create a case and allocate time to it without an estimate.

Now, I'm happy to create a project/area for administrative tasks and allocate time against them - and stick a made-up estimate. I'm not interested in using EBS on that project but is this going to skew EBS when it comes to other projects where I am estimating properly and allocating actual programming time to cases?

Is another alternative just estimating 50 days against a task and then closing it when I reach 50 days and opening a new one or is EBS not going to be as affected as much as I think it might be?

Answer 1

There are a couple of ways to keep EBS happy and still have large "time sink" type cases.

1. Tell EBS to ignore it - EBS has the ability to permanently ignore specific cases, thereby preventing the data about that case from skewing your EBS performance
2. Never close the case - EBS will only pay attention to a case if it has been closed because it does not have complete data on it until then. This means that you can simple leave these "time sink" cases open and perhaps tag them with "ignore" so you can filter them out, or move them into a "deleted" project so you can filter them out

If you were to give the case a big estimate, and then close it once you hit that estimate, you would be giving EBS false data indicating that the estimate for that case was VERY accurate, which would skew the results from EBS, so I would avoid doing that.