VSTS Work Item: Percentage Completed

During one of my demos this past week on VSTS, somebody commented that typically developers want to provide project managers more information on a task other than “completed” or not. What they really want is a percentage complete. John Lawrence on the team at MS developing this stuff. The good news is that they have reworked the work items a bit, and now there is support for fields indicating “Completed Work” and “Remaining Work”. These numbers will synchronize with “percentage complete“ in MS Project.

I'm happy to see this as it also ties in with better metric tracking. We don't just want to know that an item was completed, but how much work it required - which maybe different than the estimate. All to often item “estimates” turn into “budgets”. This is one small way that projects often take longer. Developers often don't report that a task took less than the estimate - only more or the same as the estimate. This is one of the reasons why I like estimates that aren't time-based but effort based. In other words, we esimate an item in terms of some arbitrary scale - 1-5 let's say where 1 is easy and 5 is hard. Project managers can figure out what those numbers mean later on and do things like calculate team velocity.