How does TeamForge automatically sum up effort estimates?

As you refine your agile project plan, you break down user stories into smaller stories, and eventually into tasks. TeamForge can watch the changing effort estimates all the way down the hierarchy, and give you a running total for each parent artifact and all its children.


Imagine that you originally created a user story to describe the need for a "Shopping Cart" feature in your e-commerce application. You gave this story a rough effort estimate of 20 units, and entered that figure in the Effort field.

Upon further discussion, your project team recommends breaking the story down into three tasks:

You create artifacts for those three tasks, identifying them as children of the user story artifact, and enter their respective effort estimates in the Effort field in each task artifact.

Back in the "Shopping Cart" story artifact, you select Autosum effort to indicate that effort number for this artifact should be rolled up from its children.

Now, rather than showing the manually entered number (20 units), your user story artifact shows the figure derived from adding the effort estimates for all three child artifacts (28 units).


Effort numbers are never "double-counted" when auto-summing is on. For example, if the sum for planning folder A would include effort for child C and parent P, and P has autosumming turned on, C's effort number is only counted once.

However, when auto-summing is off, the effort numbers from parent P and child C can both contribute to totals. So if a planning folder A includes parent P (autosum=off, effort=3) and child C (effort=5), then the pair contributes a total of 8 to A's total.

An artifact's effort number is calculated from the effort numbers of its immediate children artifacts only. This is true whether or not those children's numbers are themselves automatically derived.

Note: When a tracker is disabled, artifacts from that tracker do not contribute to the effort totals calculated for any planning folder they are in.


If you are a long-time user of TeamForge tracker features, be aware that autosumming can lead to some situations you haven't seen before. For example, picture these scenarios: