Question

I am looking to take advantage of several FogBugz reports such as Completion-Date and Burn-Down Chart.

I'm working with a team of 3 (myself included)...

We have, at this point, completed a high-level design of all components (data/logic/UI) required to complete the project. We put together a project layout that identifies milestones, features within the milestones and those components required to complete them. Furthermore, collaboratively we were able to come up with estimates for each component as they were broken down in small enough pieces.

What we'd like to do is enter these cases into FogBugz and get an idea, using the Completion-Date and Burn-Down charts of what sort of timeline we are looking at.

We can certainly try to predict whom will be working on what, but that becomes difficult to predict the further you go into a project. So I have 2 questions:

1) How can we effectively come up with a Completion-Date & Burn-Down chart knowing that, most likely, cases will switch hands to developer who may have a 'poor' EBS or to a developer who may have a 'great' EBS?

2) Developer A estimates Case A at X amount and Developer B ends up taking over Case A before Developer A can get started and before time has been logged against it. If Developer B agrees with the same estimate that Developer A entered, how might we transfer that same estimate to Developer B for the purpose of evidence-based scheduling?

(I want to avoid having Developer B switch the estimate to Y and then back to X)

Answer 1

On (1) - The Burn Down chart is not per-person, so it should not be affected by cases changing hands. The completion date chart is indeed susceptible to this, but I think the best thing to do here is to treat EBS as a tool for decision making and modeling given the current data; that is, when things start getting out-of-whack because one developer is ahead of schedule and another is behind, use EBS to find out what happens when you give some of developer A's cases to developer B; it's really hard to try to account for that stuff at the beginning of a project, so EBS is best used as an adaptive (rather than a predictive) tool for that purpose.

On (2) - You have hit it, the only workaround right now (aside from writing a plugin that automatically switches the estimator to the current AssignedTo when work begins), is to switch the estimate to Y and then back to X, or have developer B make a minute change to the estimate to make it his own. Sorry, I know that's not ideal.