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azureazure-devopsestimation

Original Estimates in Azure DevOps - Max value?

Our evolution of using DevOps is continuing (slowly but surely). One thing we've noticed is that some people are trying to but excessive estimates in for their time, but what we really want to be encouraging is for people to be breaking work down into multiple tasks.

Is there a way that we can set our DevOps work items to only accept a maximum value? I've had a look at the 'rules' and there doesn't seem to be anything there to let us do this, and because it's an out of the box field I don't think we can put a value limit against it.

I suppose what I want to understand is whether it would be possible to do this in some way? Could I do something with the existing 'Original Estimate' field or would I have to create a new custom field to have any chance of preventing people from putting in 100 hours for something that's actually more like 2?

Solution

  • If you are also using Boards, you could highlight work items where the original estimate is higher than a certain value. This would not prevent setting these values, but rather encourage the users to put in lower values.

    https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/boards/boards/customize-cards?view=azure-devops example configuratoin

    Beware that this might not really help the underlying issue: People must be convinced of the benefits of splitting up tasks, otherwise they will just work around the tooling. Like always putting in the maximum value or not putting in the actual work hours.