Distributed Estimation

Inspiration

Remote teams is not something new nowadays. In the age of outsourcing there is a pretty decent chance that one day you come to the office and realise that nobody is there in the middle of the working day or during the estimation meeting.

So there is plenty of knowledge and experience about handling estimation meetings without physical presence in the same room. But what to do when your team is outsourced and scattered among different time zones, so there is no opportunity for everyone to meet online?

The most common solution (or at least such is my impression) is to ask participants to write their estimates in the comments of your issue tracker, per issue. While it might work, there is a few disadvantages to such approach:

• there is no "centralised" place for estimation results
• issues become "dirty" really fast

So I decided to take this "dirty" part out of the Issue Comments and move this functionality into an add-on.

What it does

The Add-On solves the problem of estimating across multiple time zones

How I built it

The Add-On is built with the following stack:

• node.js
• express.js
• angular.js
• socket.io
• mongodb
• mongoose

Challenges I ran into

The most challenging task was to match dependencies after migrating to the new MongoDB version.

What I learned

I learned how to host and deploy apps with heroku

What's next for Distributed Estimation

I really love solving challenges of distributed teams, so I'm not going to stop on this Add-On. The next Add-Ons are:

• Relative Estimation
• Retrospective

Built With

• angular.js
• express.js
• mongodb
• mongoose
• node.js
• socket.io