Estimate effort for agile development

Once the product features have been sketched out, the project team figures out what it will take to deliver them.

Effort estimates are almost always most accurate when they address small, discrete chunks of work. But you need to forecast effort for a large, complex undertaking. TeamForge helps bridge this gap by dynamically calculating effort estimates at multiple levels.

Choose a top-down or a bottom-up approach, or some combination of both.

Top-down: Break the work down into discrete chunks, then use your experience and judgment to come up with a real-world estimate for this artifact.
Bottom-up: Have the effort estimates for all the artifact's children (if any) automatically added and shown in this artifact.

Analyzing the work is an iterative, interactive process. As you go through it, you'll find your effort estimates changing shape in response to feedback from scoping the product, planning out the work, and completing the work.

With your team, review the artifacts the product owner has created. How much effort will each one require? Do any of them require special skills or training? Record your observations about each artifact in its Comment field.
Tip:
- If you are using a Scrum-based process, use the Story Points field to record the relative difficulty of a piece of work. See the planning folder summary for the total story points assigned to artifacts in that planning folder.
- If you are estimating in actual hours, or in some other unit, such as person-hours or "ideal hours," use the Effort fields. Select Sum effort from children to have the parent artifact show the total effort estimated.
For each user story, identify the specific tasks that will be required. Create an artifact to contain each of these tasks. Declare each of these task artifacts a "child" of the initial artifact. Now you can attempt to estimate the work involved in each task artifact. This will be the raw material for your higher-level effort estimates and progress tracking.
Note: When a tracker is disabled, artifacts from that tracker do not contribute to the effort totals calculated for any planning folder they are in.
As you proceed, you will find the overall picture taking on definition. Relationships among artifacts will emerge, and many of them will seem to fall into one one logical group or another. Let these groupings determine the names and purposes of your planning folders.