GitHub trick: check how long it takes you to implement a story

I wrote a while back about why I believe it’s important to use estimations to become a better developer. In a nutshell:

• It helps planning, as you might want sometimes to give a higher priority to quick stories with lower business values.
• It forces you to understand what you’re going to do.
• By comparing your estimation with the actual time it took to implement the story, it helps you reflect on why it took more/less time than you thought.

The last point is particularly important in my opinion. A Good Developer™ knows his team, his work environment, his tools and his product. Once you got there, you are able to estimate pretty accurately, and often actually you don’t feel the need to estimate anymore.

But to get there, you need feedback about where to improve. Who’s going to give you that feedback when you work alone for instance? When a story took an hour more than what you expected, you should wonder why (several times). Often it will lead you to make changes in the way you work, to become more efficient. You wasted time on your tools? It’s time to learn how to use them like a pro. You discovered a new part of the code? Maybe a refactor is a good idea now to make it easier to read. You had unexpected dependencies on someone else or another team? Think about it for your next similar story.

I always measure how long it takes me to implement something. I used to have a home-made tool for this. Now I simply use GitHub.

When you start a story, assign it to yourself:

It will log when you did this.

If you were already assigned to the story, clear the assignee field and reassign it to yourself.

When you close the story, simply look up, you’ll see how long it took. That simple! Use it extensively!