Before you report
Delivery Date Forecast
Say when the remaining work is likely done, or how much will fit by a date, as a range built from what your team has actually finished.
Read an export from Jira, Azure DevOps, Asana, Trello or a spreadsheet, as .csv or .xlsx, inside your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
Tracker export
Drop a spreadsheet here
From Jira, Azure DevOps, Asana, Trello or a spreadsheet: one row per item, with a status, a created date and a done date.
A range from the team’s own weeks
The tool counts how many items the team finished in each recent week, then builds ten thousand possible futures by drawing those weeks at random, a busy one here, a quiet one there, until the remaining work is used up. The spread of finish dates across all those futures is the forecast: the date half of them beat, the date 85 percent beat, the date nearly all of them beat. No estimates are needed, and none of the numbers is a guess about the future; each is a week the team already had.
Two questions
“When will these 40 items be done?” gives dates. “How many can we finish by the end of August?” gives a count, and the useful answer there is the one you can be 85 percent sure of reaching, not the average, which the team misses about half the time.
Scope that keeps growing
Backlogs rarely stand still. Add a set number of new items a week, or let the simulation add them at the pace the history shows. When work arrives faster than it is finished, the tool says that the remaining work is never done at that rate, which is the honest forecast and usually the most useful thing on the page.
What it assumes
That the next weeks look like the history window. A team about to change size, or coming out of a holiday month, should pick the window accordingly. It counts items rather than points: the history already holds the usual mix of sizes. It will not produce a range from fewer than six weeks or ten finished items, because a range from so little would look precise and mean nothing.
What this does not do
It does not know that a particular item is large, blocked or depends on another team. It forecasts the flow of the whole backlog, not a schedule of tasks; for work with real dependencies, the Critical Path Calculator does that. It is a forecast, and the date to promise is a decision for the people who make the promise.