Comment by awesan
9 days ago
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.
Jira is fine.
Jira is excel for task management. OOTB setup works absolutely great, and then someone comes along who wants a custom field on tasks to support <something that they read about elsewhere> and now you have to fill in that custom field. they leave, and someone else comes in and adds a new one. 5 years later you have 11 new fields that partially overlap, some are needed for some views, some are needed for other, but you can't use default boards because person Y decided that they wanted to call Epics Feat's, and made a custom issue type.
And in the end, the people who actualy use those boards just export a filter to excel and work there...
People. The problem is people.