Comment by SyneRyder
4 days ago
I liked this idea when it came out, and there was some software that implemented it. Mr Schedule by Andrew Pietschy added outliner functionality to Joel's idea, so you could see how much time a group of subtasks would take (and if you should maybe drop that feature group to make your deadline). It had some keyboard driven shortcuts that made it faster to move around in than Excel, while making things simpler.
Unfortunately Mr Schedule and the pietschy.com website disappeared. I made my own recreation using REALbasic / Xojo at the time, but never released it and faded from using it.
Joel Spolsky expanded the idea later with Evidence Based Scheduling:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/10/26/evidence-based-sch...
That takes the estimates from Painless Software Schedules, but runs a Monte Carlo simulation using your estimates & data on actual time taken, to create a confidence distribution curve graph of when you'll be finished.
I have done the monte carlo thing in practice with a team and it works well under some conditions.
The most important is that the team needs to actually use the task board (or whatever data source you use to get your inputs) to track their work actively. It cannot be an afterthought that gets looked at every now and then, it actually needs to be something the team uses.
My current team kind of doesn't like task boards because people tend to work in small groups on projects where they can keep that stuff in their own heads. This requires some more communication but that happens naturally anyway. They are still productive, but this kind of forecasting doesn't work then.
I hate this whole thing with me having to use some tool to track the work (usually Jira which is a PoS). My entire output is data, why can't a tool automatically summarise what I'm doing? It seems an ideal task for an AI actually.
Here's a real schedule: CEO: we need to launch x end of Q2 PM: Here are the four monthly milestones Engineer Mgr: Let's estimate the stories. Now put them into eight sprints Go!