Managing Projects with Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System

Estimating Work and Scheduling with Visual Studio Team System

To this point we’ve talked about how to create an iteration plan by scheduling scenarios into iterations, splitting the stories into tasks, and then finally estimating the tasks. What happens if you don’t have enough time in your iteration to perform these tasks? In fact, there is a big difference between estimating and scheduling. Up to this point we have assumed that since we assigned a scenario to an iteration, all of the tasks that derive from the scenario should get done in that same iteration; however, what if there just isn’t enough time? And even more importantly, how much time do you really have to spend working on tasks in an iteration anyway?

Let’s start to answer this question ...