5 ms·

Is it really important to track progress on a day to day basis? IMO, only for a small minority of tasks. The vast majority of projects I've seen and worked on

Is it really important to track progress on a day to day basis? IMO, only for a small minority of tasks. The vast majority of projects I've seen and worked on are measured in dev years of effort. My current project is well over a thousand dev years. In comparison a few days is meaningless. Most often it's a trust issue.

matthewmacleod 9y ago
Is it really important to track progress on a day to day basis? It depends on the team. We find it useful specifically because we want to make sure we are estimating relatively accurately. Since we work in essentially 10-working-day periods, it's great to know when a piece of work we thought we could easily achieve is actually a blocker, or much more complex than we thought.
jakubp 9y ago
A thousand man-years of effort? Sounds like a very large project. Just for contrast: I've been working for a medium size software house for the past 4 years. Typical project size is somewhere around 500 to 1000 man days. On that scale, individual days matter. Still, I also have the impression that they matter because Clients demand certainty and precision in reporting rather than focusing on actual value delivered, but the management doesn't always see it that way.
- sheepmullet 9y ago
  > A thousand man-years of effort? Sounds like a very large project. Kind of. It's upper-medium. It's nothing compared to Microsoft Office, a web browser, etc. Microsoft for example has maybe 50k developers and so creates 50,000 man years of work every single year. > Typical project size is somewhere around 500 to 1000 man days. That's roughly 2 devs for a year. That's hardly even a prototype where I work. It is fascinating to see the difference in scale in our industry.
lairdpop 9y ago
Daily standups aren't for tracking progress, they're for keeping the team in sync, and in particular are a forum for raising blockers/dependencies so that they an be addressed. Tracking progress goes on a Kanban board (or digital equivalent).
- sheepmullet 9y ago
  > The Development Team uses the Daily Scrum to inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal and to inspect how progress is trending toward completing the work in the Sprint Backlog. www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#events-daily

matthewmacleod 9y ago

Is it really important to track progress on a day to day basis? It depends on the team. We find it useful specifically because we want to make sure we are estimating relatively accurately. Since we work in essentially 10-working-day periods, it's great to know when a piece of work we thought we could easily achieve is actually a blocker, or much more complex than we thought.

jakubp 9y ago

A thousand man-years of effort? Sounds like a very large project. Just for contrast: I've been working for a medium size software house for the past 4 years. Typical project size is somewhere around 500 to 1000 man days. On that scale, individual days matter. Still, I also have the impression that they matter because Clients demand certainty and precision in reporting rather than focusing on actual value delivered, but the management doesn't always see it that way.

sheepmullet 9y ago
> A thousand man-years of effort? Sounds like a very large project. Kind of. It's upper-medium. It's nothing compared to Microsoft Office, a web browser, etc. Microsoft for example has maybe 50k developers and so creates 50,000 man years of work every single year. > Typical project size is somewhere around 500 to 1000 man days. That's roughly 2 devs for a year. That's hardly even a prototype where I work. It is fascinating to see the difference in scale in our industry.

lairdpop 9y ago

Daily standups aren't for tracking progress, they're for keeping the team in sync, and in particular are a forum for raising blockers/dependencies so that they an be addressed. Tracking progress goes on a Kanban board (or digital equivalent).

sheepmullet 9y ago
> The Development Team uses the Daily Scrum to inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal and to inspect how progress is trending toward completing the work in the Sprint Backlog. www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#events-daily