2009/08/27
I used to think that hours burndown is better that story points for tracking sprint progress. However now I think that hours are not so good at all.
First problem with hours is that it is easy to start tracking only implementation time ignoring acceptance testing or functional testing done by testers. We could of course track remaining time for implementation and testing separately for each story but then we had to spend even more time keeping our estimates up to date. In addition it doesn't really matter if we think we are 60%, 80% or 90% done - story either is done or is not done according to the definition agreed by the team.
Of course it is harder to get the story points burndown to be as nice looking as hours. But story points burndown shows clearly when we have either too big stories or we are pushing acceptance testing too much to the end of the sprint.
