Any chance of a burn down?

[Stephen Kestle <st...@kestle.net>]

Hi there!

You guys are using JIRA, which has a very tantalising feature of time 
estimation and a burndown chart that is immensely useful in determining 
how things are going along.

Would it be possible to just have some gross estimates of how long it's 
going to take "you" (the committer) to finish the work.  Nothing to be 
held to - just a guess.  It'll give a rough idea of what's going on

e.g. if it's going to take 5 hours to do, and you spend 1.5 hours a 
night (on average) then say 3 or 4 days.

    * I don't care if the days say they're 8 hours or whatever
    * I don't care if the "burn down" burns up because new tickets are
      being added into 0.8

This will help me see at a guess if 0.8 is going to be ready in days (I 
don't think so), weeks (maybe), months (hopefully in low numbers), or years.

It will also help me sell ACE to my work which is currently developing 
OSGi provisioning and soon deployment services, and potentially get 
patches sent your way.

If you say "yes" (please please please...), it'd be pretty awesome to 
have a guess at the "release date" based on looking at the chart burn 
down and your gut feeling.  Again, I don't care if it's accurate or not 
(it's going to be about 10x more accurate than any guess I can come up 
with based on ticket flows etc).

Thanks for giving me hope for something better than Web Start! ;)

Stephen

Re: Any chance of a burn down?

[Marcel Offermans <ma...@luminis.nl>]

Hello Stephen,

On Mar 1, 2011, at 12:07 , Stephen Kestle wrote:

> You guys are using JIRA, which has a very tantalising feature of time estimation and a burndown chart that is immensely useful in determining how things are going along.

True, burndown charts are useful in Scrum/Agile projects.

> Would it be possible to just have some gross estimates of how long it's going to take "you" (the committer) to finish the work.  Nothing to be held to - just a guess.  It'll give a rough idea of what's going on
> 
> e.g. if it's going to take 5 hours to do, and you spend 1.5 hours a night (on average) then say 3 or 4 days.
> 
>   * I don't care if the days say they're 8 hours or whatever
>   * I don't care if the "burn down" burns up because new tickets are
>     being added into 0.8
> 
> This will help me see at a guess if 0.8 is going to be ready in days (I don't think so), weeks (maybe), months (hopefully in low numbers), or years.

Well, I think for an open source project in general, and also for ACE it will be hard to estimate the amount of hours that each committer can spend per day or week. It will vary wildly. So whilst I agree that working with agile methods like Scrum makes sense in a lot of projects, I doubt that it has much value here. I mean, I don't think it would give you a better insight into the amount of work that needs to be done before the 0.8 release than by just looking at the remaining issues.

My rough guess would be that we try to do a release in weeks (not days or months). That would be our first release, and it would allow more people to try out ACE and provide feedback.

> It will also help me sell ACE to my work which is currently developing OSGi provisioning and soon deployment services, and potentially get patches sent your way.

Patches or any other feedback is always welcome. I hope that does not depend on us producing a burn down chart. ;)

> If you say "yes" (please please please...), it'd be pretty awesome to have a guess at the "release date" based on looking at the chart burn down and your gut feeling.  Again, I don't care if it's accurate or not (it's going to be about 10x more accurate than any guess I can come up with based on ticket flows etc).

I'll keep my estimate at "weeks" for now. :)

> Thanks for giving me hope for something better than Web Start! ;)

You're welcome!

Greetings, Marcel