Understanding GreenHopper charts

Where to begin?

Many developers are now using Agile methodologies to produce results. Hopefully making use of Jira and Greenhopper for managing the backlog.

Everybody knows, or should know the project triangle.

What we know about this is that we can only edit 2 sides if we want our project to go well. In an ideal world we would have control of all three but generally project resource is finite and the time scales are fixed iteration dates.

How long with a job take?

Even the best engineers have great difficulty predicting the future. There are a huge number of variables involved in predicting how long a job will take, some of the big ones are:

• Who will do the task?
• How difficult will the task be to achieve sign off?
• Is the subject code base buggy?

With all these unknown elements, how can you possibly predict how long a project will take, even ball park estimates are risky on a project of any real size.

What the charts should provide a good team lead?

The charts allow you to learn from you previous encounters. Rather than comparing apples with pairs or Bobs estimate for how long Bill will take to complete a task, we can use the estimates from our completed tasks to guess the likelihood of our remaining estimates being correct.

From the charts you can ascertain a teams "velocity", this is the speed at which the team is able to complete the tasks estimated in units of difficulty (hours/complexity/score out of 10).