Time Tracking of Actuals

Questions that prompted this note :

"If we don't track actual hours, how can we validate our velocity?"

"What if a team member worked on a task that was estimated at 16 hours, they spend a whole day working 16 hours, but still have 18 more to complete the task. If we don't track actuals, how do we catch this problem?"

First, tracking actual hours is not part of Scrum, intentionally so.  I understand that many organizations require hours tracking for accounting, CMM, etc., and you should track your actuals if required to do so, but tracking should be considered a separate activity outside of the Scrum framework. Why? Several reasons: Big Brother syndrome (team members feeling that they are being watched), distracted focus on hours spent rather than work accomplished, tying hours spent to performance, and unhealthy competition between team members (I think some forms of competition ARE healthy!).

So, velocity is indeed a tracking of work completed, not hours spent.  How do you know if someone is spending an “excessive” amount of time on a task?  That’s where the principles of self-managed teams and visibility kick in.  Let’s consider two scenarios, and in both cases developer Purnima is working on a task that was sized at 16 hours.  After her first day of working on this task, Purnima comes to the Daily Scrum.

Scenario 1:  Purnima simply reports:  “I worked on the task to populate the test bed yesterday.  My revised estimate is now 18 hours.”

What’s wrong with this update?  There’s no substance to it.  There’s nothing to help the other team members understand why the original estimate was off, what in particular Purnima was doing during that long day yesterday, and how likely it is that the new estimate makes sense.  Yes, she answered the first question of the Daily Scrum, but did so in a manner that provides inadequate visibility into her work.

Scenario 2:  Purnima reports:  “I worked on the task to populate the test bed yesterday, and it’s bigger than we thought.  I spent all day and into the night, getting home at 2 this morning, and I think there’s still 18 hours left.  There's a whole series of tables that we missed during Sprint Planning. We really underestimated this one!”

This scenario should then generate some conversation about what a mess we might have on our hands.  What should we do?  How can we help?  etc. (Remember, this is not the place to solve problems, but we certainly must take the opportunity to expose them.)

In either scenario, what if Purnima made her report, and none of her teammates asked any questions?  Worse, what if after the second day of work Purnima reports, “Well, I continued to work on the test bed population task, and we still have 12 hours left.”  Shame on the team members who don’t ask her, “Hey, Purnima, this is the second day that you’ve reported this task as being much bigger than we thought.  This has the potential to cause a missed delivery.  What can we do to ensure that we stay on target?”  Or, if the team fails to engage Purnima, they should be looking at the Burndown every day and they would see that their velocity is running flatter than expected.  THAT had better generate some conversation if Purnima ’s update didn’t!

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