[teampractices] ANYONE: Phab, burnup charts, and double-counting

[Kevin Smith]

Hi all,

As I am digesting our phab charting needs this week, I had the thought:
Will we have a problem with "double-counting" points for epics, and for
non-epic "tasks that contain subtasks"?

To calculate "work completed", we would presumably sum up all the "done"
stories in all of the relevant sprint projects. If a story within a sprint
got estimated, and the split into subtasks, which also got estimated,
wouldn't we count those points twice?

One challenge is that phab does not have a special case for "subtask". At a
data level, there is no difference between a subtask and a task which is
blocked by other tasks.

Epics wouldn't typically get added to a sprint project, so even if they had
an estimate, they wouldn't be likely to get included in a "work completed"
sum. However, when calculating the "scope of release" (the top,
hopefully-horizontal line in a burnup chart), they could be a problem.

To calculate a target scope, I'm imagining that a team would set up some
kind of "release" goal project, and that we would sum up all the work in it
to calculate the target scope. If an epic (or any other task) gets
estimated, and then gets split into subtasks which get estimated, we risk
double-counting.

I only started thinking about this an hour ago, but so far I am perplexed
as to how to work around this. For what it's worth, solutions could include
technical features, or socially-enforced conventions.

Kevin Smith
Agile Coach
Wikimedia Foundation



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