Comment by skybrian
Yes, that’s basically how we did it. Though not formally accounting for vacation days; there were four of us and we didn’t have people coming and going much. We only did it once a week during the retrospective. It’s not hard to add up story points for the week and remember what you did in previous weeks. You could enter it into a spreadsheet if you want to get fancy.
The concept comes from Extreme Programming. Software implementations came later. I think Pivotal Tracker does something useful, but you need a larger team for it to matter.
Here are some photographs of the team room:
> I think Pivotal Tracker does something useful, but you need a larger team for it to matter.
My buddy and I built what ended up being an $80m/yr gross revenue business entirely using PT for ourselves. We shipped a MVP exactly to the week we predicted. It helped that we both worked at Pivotal and knew exactly how to use PT correctly.
You certainly were early with the process and I applaud you for that! PT wasn't released until 2008.