Streams

IN THIS ARTICLE

A Stream is a group of roles that typically work together on common activities or deliverables. They are a simple, yet powerful concept in Estii that makes it easier to assign estimates to multiple roles, and track the total effort attributed to them.

Stream overview

Streams are common to all deals within a space. Access Streams from the main menu.

A stream can represent a loaded resource, a team (or group of teams) or a common deliverable
Streams contain allocations of resources, either directly through roles, or indirectly through other streams. The ratio (or scale) of these allocations determine how effort assigned to the stream is distributed across those resources
Stream allocations can either be a shared resource (default) or dedicated resource for that stream.
Streams can be allocated to features and overheads within a phase
Streams can be added or removed from the scope of a phase (like features), and contribute to the calculated duration of the phase schedule

Add stream

To add a stream, click New stream to open a new stream window. Enter a name and assign some resources (see below)

Reorder streams

Streams can be reordered and moved between categories via drag and drop. The order of streams determines their display order elsewhere in the space (such as in autocomplete drop downs)

Allocating resources

A Stream contains resource allocations (either roles or other streams).

To assign a resource to a stream, click Assign resource and type or look-up the resource.

Each assigned resource requires an allocation.* The default allocation is 1 (100% of a full resource), however partial and multiple allocations are also supported

The units and price columns contain the sum of all resources within those allocations

Dedicated resources

By default, allocated roles are part of a shared resource pool within a deal. In some cases, streams might require seperate roles (e.g. an iOS developer that is distinct from an Android developer).

Rather than create duplicate roles in the rate card, you can use the dedicated toggle to make them unique to a stream.

You can blend dedicated and shared resources, like in the example below:

The Solution Architect and Test Engineer are part of the shared resource pool
The Developer is unique to this stream

Within the deal schedule, dedicated roles will be grouped under the stream name

Stream examples

Role-based allocations

A loaded resource (such as 100% of a developer, plus 25% of a tester, plus 10% of a team lead)
A blended rate containing a split of seniorities of the same resources (such as 60% of a senior designer and 40% of a mid-level designer)
A multi-person feature squad with 6 developers, 2 testers, 1 designer, 1 product owner and 25% of an architect and 20% of a product writer

Stream-based allocations

Streams can contain allocations of other streams, enabling reuse of common streams or combining loaded resources (as in the previous examples).

Some other examples of stream based allocations:

A partial dependency on another stream (such as a 25% allocation of a Support stream to a Squad)
An alias for assigning multiple stream at once (such as a Mobile stream that contains 1 iOS stream, and 1 Android stream)
A container for related packages or services (such as a Support stream that contains Bronze, Silver and Gold Support streams.
A specialisation of a generic stream (such as an iPad and an iPhone stream, each containing one allocation of an iOS stream

Deleting streams

When you remove a stream, Estii first checks to see if it is currently referenced by any other streams.

If a stream is already in use, you will be prompted to choose one of the following options before it can be removed

Map all references to another stream
Remove all existing references

Import / export streams

You can import and export streams to CSV.

The import/export formats are identical, so you can use this feature to migrate streams between spaces.

CSV file format

The expected format is comma delimited csv with the following columns:

Column	Description	Notes
Name	Name of the stream	Required
Resource	Name of an existing role (or stream) to allocate.	Required
Allocation	The number of this resource to allocate (e.g. 1, 0.5 or 5)	Required.
Dedicated	Flag to indicate if role is dedicated to this stream	Optional. Either 1 or 0 (defaults to 0)

Example:

Name,Resource,Allocation,Dedicated
Web,Web Lead,0.25,0
Web,Web Developer,0.75,0
Web,QA Engineer,0.25,0
Backend,Backend Lead,0.3,0
Backend,Backend Developer,0.7,0
Backend,QA Engineer,0.25,0
iOS,iOS Lead,0.2,0
iOS,iOS Developer,0.8,0
iOS,QA Engineer,0.25,0
Android,Android Lead,0.2,0
Android,Android Developer,0.8,0
Android,QA Engineer,0.25,0
Design,Design Lead,1,0
Design,Designer,2,0
Design,Business Analyst,0.5,0
Mobile,iOS,1,1
Mobile,Android,1,1

Import streams

To import streams from another space, select Import streams and choose a CSV file.

The imported streams will appear immediately.

Export streams

To export all your streams to a CSV file, select Export streams from the ... menu on the top right. The file will download immediately.

Using streams

Allocating streams to features and overheads

Streams can be allocated to features and overheads within a Phase.

Adding/removing streams from phase scope

Streams can be added and removed from scope, however their behaviour changes based on their contents:

If a stream contains roles (or a combination of roles and streams), it will appear in the scope view
If a stream only contains other streams, only the children will appear in the scope view. The parent stream is essentially an alias for estimation purposes

Updating streams on a deal

Deals store a versioned copy of roles, rate cards and streams that can be updated from the deal page.