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Release date forecaster

"When will it be done?" deserves a range, not a date. Put in your backlog, your velocity, how much it varies and how fast new scope arrives, and get best, likely and worst-case dates you can actually defend.

Your delivery

Use the mean of your last 5 sprints, not your best one.
25%
How far your best and worst sprints sit from the average. Take your highest and lowest of the last five - most teams land between 20% and 35%.
5%
New work discovered or requested each sprint, as a share of the original backlog. Set it to zero only if your scope is genuinely frozen.

Scope pressure

New scope arriving-
Effective net velocity-

Net velocity is what actually reduces the backlog. When new scope approaches your delivery rate, the finish date stops moving closer no matter how hard the team works.

Likely completion

-

Best case-

Likely-

The date to plan against internally

Worst case-

Dates are calculated from today and assume the team keeps working at the rates above. They are a forecast, not a promise - which is exactly how they should be communicated.

Commit to a range, report against the range

A single date is a promise made with information you don't have. A range is a forecast made with information you do have, and it survives contact with reality because it already contains the possibility that reality is inconvenient.

Quote the pessimistic date externally. Plan internally against the likely one. Finishing early is a gift you can give a stakeholder; finishing late is a debt you have to explain. The gap between the two dates is the size of that choice.

The variability number is more honest than the average. Two teams both averaging 30 points per sprint are in completely different situations if one ranges 28 to 32 and the other ranges 12 to 48. The second team cannot commit to anything, and their forecast should say so out loud.

Scope growth is usually the real problem. When a date keeps slipping while the team ships steadily, the backlog is growing behind them. This tool makes that visible: if new scope arrives at anything close to your velocity, no amount of delivery gets you to done, and the conversation that's needed is about intake, not effort.

Re-forecast every sprint. A forecast made once at the start of a quarter is a guess with a timestamp. Rerun it with the actual velocity each sprint and the range narrows naturally as you approach the end - which is a far better story to tell leadership than a fixed date quietly moving right.

Dates keep slipping? Let's look at whyAll free tools
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  Release date forecaster by
  <a href="https://veljkobarnic.com/tools/release-forecast/">Veljko Barnić</a>
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