Scrum planning/burndown based on time remaining instead of story points

[Drew]

Our organization has not yet adopted story points, but we do use sprints. We use hours to plan and measure burndown... so in effect hours are our story-points. I submit that there are other organizations like this and that allowing greenhopper to use time estimates instead of story points would be widely applicable.

Issue 1:

To create sprints, I use the "Planning Board" to plan the sprint using time remaining. Then I write down what the "last" issue id is, switch to a scrum rapid board, find my "last" issue again, and move my sprint marker to the right place.

If the sprint marker could be use 'time remaining' instead of story points, I could do all this from the rapid board.

Issue 2:

Burndown charts look really useful... but since I don't use story points, it's actually useless.

Edit (I phrased my question as a feature request... let me correct that now):

Question 1) I can use "version statistics" to create a sprint marker-ish divider. Once I have the right number of issues "above" the marker, how do I start a sprint?

(My current solution is to write down the issue id, switch to a scrum rapid board, find the issue again, and move the sprint marker into the right position.)

Question 2) Is there a burndown chart that plots time estimated/remaining (instead of story points)? I've found a dashboard widget that does this, but not a chart within the "agile" tab.

[Drew · Accepted solution]

After refusing to believe that I'm not the only one who wants this functionality, I found the setting that I missed before.

Once you've created an agile board:

1. Click "tools" in the upper right
2. Click "configure" in the dropdown/context menu
3. Click on the "estimation" tab to the right of "swimlanes" and "quick filters"
4. Change the "estimation statistic" to "original time estimate"

[Renjith Pillai]

The usage of Planning Board along with Task Board/Chart Board is one form of Greenhopper usage. The usage of Rapidboard is another way (and the newer) way of using Greenhopper. And also note that Rapidboard is still in labs.

In the traditional GH usage, you have the statistics for story points as well as efforts and Sprints are planned as regular versions (created directly in Planning board itself)

And burn downs are useful even with estimates. If the team is recording the remaining estimate for the sprint tasks, their sprint progress is clearly visible in their burn down. And for the product owner, the hour burn down could be used for the Release progress as well.