The marketplace for Visual Studio Team Services is constantly growing since November 2015 and teams of developers are sharing their tools. After the AIT Voting Extension was released in December 2015 we would like to introduce our latest AIT Extension, the AIT Wall Estimation Extension. This extension empowers you and your team to estimate your work items with spatially distributed members. The focus of this tool is to create a common platform for estimating the effort for each work item together.
– Estimate your work items easy and fast within your VSTS
– Bring all your distributed team members together virtually for your planning meetings
– Gain an overview about the current estimations of your backlog
For more information please refer to our short video tutorial:
Requirements
- The work items you want to estimate have the state of ‘proposed’ for Agile/CMMI or ‘new’ for SCRUM template.
- Make sure that each team member has enough user rights to edit work items in the selected team/project.
Quick Steps
- Navigate to the teams or projects backlog in your VSTS, where the items are located, you would like to estimate.
- Now your team lead or any other team member can navigate to the settings page of the currently selected team/backlog.
- Choose a scale type within the ‘wall estimation’-hub to estimate your work items, otherwise we will choose a default exponential scale for you. The scale type will be applied automatically to your estimation.
- After you have selected the appropriate scale for your estimation, just navigate back to your product backlog.
You can start the estimation by just hitting the ‘Wall Estimation’ hub. Everybody else can now join your estimation to discuss and reach your next sprint goal!
This extension is a great idea but I don’t think it works with all the templates. I pretty much use Scrum for everything I work on and for that even though I have backlog items that are New with no Effort they do no show up I get the “Its Lonely in Here” message. I noticed that your demos you were using the CMMI template so I quickly put one up added some requirements and sure enough it works. My question, am I correct in assuming that this is the only template that it supports right now? and when might it be capable of supporting Scrum?
Thanks
Donald Schulz
Hi Donald,
thanks for your reply. We actually tested the extension against all predefined templates. I just checked it again. I created a new Scrum-based team project, added some new items to the backlog, switched to the Wall Estimation and was able to do estimations. I’ll contact you to get more details.
Kind regards,
Lars