Hi! I have some questions about how the predictive dates in the roadmap are calculated. We have several epics within a project, and the epics are in various statuses. Some are completed and closed, some are fully decomposed (meaning all issues/work has been identified and sized) and work is being done, some are still in the process of being decomposed.
As the work within the epics is added and sized the predictive dates are changing, as would be expected. However, it is unclear what metrics ZenHub is using to arrive at these predictive dates. Can you help me understand how ZenHub arrives at these dates?
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Hey Jorja, I’m glad to hear that you’re leveraging the roadmap to gain a high level view of your projects and their progress 
ZenHub uses your team’s current average velocity determine the predicted end dates. That is, how many story points on average is your team completing in a given sprint. ZenHub extrapolates how many sprints, or how much time, it might take your team to complete every story point in the project or epic by using your average velocity.
Having an accurate average velocity has a huge affect on the predicted end dates on the roadmap, so ensure you are being consistent with how you estimate and assign story points and you’ll get a pretty accurate prediction. If you’re keen to improve your estimation or want to learn how to estimate more effectively, we have an excellent article on the subject: Estimate work using story points in ZenHub
Hope this helps!
Thanks for the response. Let me ask a more detailed follow-up question. Hopefully, you can help me understand what I am seeing on our roadmap.
In a project, we have 604 total story points of sized work (some work is still waiting to be sized). 509 of those points are completed.
That leaves 95 points of work still to be completed.
The team’s current velocity is 26.
Working in 2-week sprints, it should take us about 4 sprints to complete that work.
However, the predicted dates in the roadmap are showing an early April estimated completion.
I am trying to help the business understand when this functionality could be ready for release based on the current scope and velocity, but I am having trouble understanding how the predicted dates are being presented. Can you help?
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Can you please reach out to support@zenhub.com with your GitHub username and the name of your Workspace? Sounds like we need to take a closer look here. Thanks!
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Sorry for the confusion Jorja, I had completely misunderstood our roadmap predictions. These predicted end dates are based off of a velocity for each individual epic, not the team’s velocity.
I will update our help article on the subject to be more clear, as this article currently states that it is the team’s velocity that is used for predicting end dates, which is quite misleading given that the velocity used in the roadmap is determined by the speed at which issues in an epic are closed and is not the sprint velocity.