Agilefant.org

Since currently there's - besides the installation instructions - no user guide to Agilefant, we are collecting common questions & their answers here.

Currently, the easiest way to ask a how-to question is to email team(at)agilefant.org.

How should you use 'estimated effort left' for a backlog item when there's multiple responsibles?

You should enter the total effort required from all the responsible people; for example, if two people working on a task by pair programming, and they think it'll take three more hours to get done, the estimated effort left should be 2x3h=6h. Likewise, if there's going to be an entire morning (9:00-12:00) sprint planning session with the entire team involved (8 people), the estimated effort left would be 8x3h=24h.

What is the 'default overhead' for a project and how should it be used?

Overhead denotes those things in a project that are during a work week bound to take up time from everyone assigned to the project, but for some reason or another do not make sense to enter as backlog items of their own.

For example, if the project employs daily scrum meetings that on the average take 20min, the default overhead overhead would be 5x20min = 100min.

As another example, you might want to create a project with no backlog items to account for the R&D organization's Helpdesk and user support duties. Based on a historical average, these could take the person assigned to the duty some 3h per week, and if a larger request for support comes up, you can always make a new backlog item to account for it.

Currently, we recommend that you use the project's description to keep record of what things sum up to the project's default overhead. It's easy to forget.

Note that you can adjust the total overheads of individual users from the Dev Portfolio tab. To continue the above example, if one of the people assigned to a project are present only two days a week and thus attends only two daily scrums a week, you would want to adjust his overhead by -3x20min = 1h.

Why can't you make effort estimates for tasks?

Agilefant used to have this feature, but we noticed it encouraged making too big backlog items (remember e.g. the rule of thumb from Scrum; if it's over 12h, you don't really know how big it is) so we removed it. And sorry, it's not coming back in the foreseeable future - we suggest you make several smaller backlog items instead

Why cannot tasks have responsibles?

Because we haven't yet gotten around to implement it.
But we've had requests for this, and in some cases would find it useful in our own use as well.

So stay tuned, probably we'll do it at the beginning of Summer 2008.

In the meanwhile, here's a question onhow it should work:
1) Should you be able to mark as responsible for a task
  a) any user? if so, should he be assigned to the backlog item as well?
  b) only those users that have been assigned to the project?
  c) only those users that have been assigned to the backlog item?
  d) other?

2) Should these somehow be reflected in the Load calculations?

Currently, the effort remaining for a task is split evenly among those responsible for it. We think that this would be the way to do it also in the future, but are asking your opinion for the sake of argument.

Please comment directly here!