When my company first started using Scrum it was with Rally. It had story point, but also estimated time and actual time. We used them all, and I found the estimated and actual time to be the most useful. We then went to Jira, which kept the points and dropped the time.
Since we were tracking the actual time things took as well, our estimates got better over time. The team would help to keep others honest. For example, writing documentation always took at least 3x longer than anyone expected, so we’d alway make people add more time to those stories.
Once we had reasonably accurate time estimates, there was also a feature for available hours. If someone was on vacation, we’d subtract those hours while planning the sprint. It was then easy to see who was over committed, balance the work, and to make sure we were being realistic.
We worked like this for about 2 years. It was probably the best 2 years I had in the job. We got a lot done, we were being strategic about our work rather than reactive, and while we would push to get things wrapped for the end of the sprint and the demo, it never involved all nighters or heroics. We pushed because people on the team wanted to do more and go faster, not because of pressure from the outside. I noticed people got more down when they tried to do less, so I’d often push back on people trying to overload the sprint. If they finished everything, we could always add more. Outside the team, our VP told us we were 3+ months ahead of everyone and if I wanted to go hang out in a cafe in Europe for a few months, go.
This is all a distant memory now. So many lessons learned, but they all fall on deaf ears in the current organization.
Since we were tracking the actual time things took as well, our estimates got better over time. The team would help to keep others honest. For example, writing documentation always took at least 3x longer than anyone expected, so we’d alway make people add more time to those stories.
Once we had reasonably accurate time estimates, there was also a feature for available hours. If someone was on vacation, we’d subtract those hours while planning the sprint. It was then easy to see who was over committed, balance the work, and to make sure we were being realistic.
We worked like this for about 2 years. It was probably the best 2 years I had in the job. We got a lot done, we were being strategic about our work rather than reactive, and while we would push to get things wrapped for the end of the sprint and the demo, it never involved all nighters or heroics. We pushed because people on the team wanted to do more and go faster, not because of pressure from the outside. I noticed people got more down when they tried to do less, so I’d often push back on people trying to overload the sprint. If they finished everything, we could always add more. Outside the team, our VP told us we were 3+ months ahead of everyone and if I wanted to go hang out in a cafe in Europe for a few months, go.
This is all a distant memory now. So many lessons learned, but they all fall on deaf ears in the current organization.