Coming Soon: Estimation By Count
(Tentatively scheduled to be enabeld October 9th)
Do you believe in planning a release ahead of time, but some of the teams in your organization are running Kanban? Do your teams have divergent definitions for what a '5' is? Have you noticed that your throughput of work items is WAY more consistent than your velocity by story points?
If so, then we have the feature that you've been waiting for.
We are proud to announce the imminent arrival of the option to do your Capacity Planning operations "By Count" instead of "By Story Points". Your Project administrator can now add a "count" value to your Preliminary Estimate mappings in addition to the "point" value.

Next, you'll notice a new field on your portfolio items called "Refined Work Item Count Estimate" which is the counterpart to "Refined Estimate" (point-based).

The coup de gras is found on the Capacity Planning page where a planner can set a plan to either "Points" or "Count" and the interface will use the matching values. If you're really adventurous and want to compare the two, you can even enter both values on the items and switch back and forth to see which ends up being more accurate (though in practice, it's good to officially stick with one!)

We sincerely hope you will enjoy this latest improvement to our planning services.
Thank you,
-Rally Product Management