A financial view: present information in dollars

It would be helpful to have a financial management-oriented view in Tracker. In other words, a view that showed estimates and outcomes in terms of dollars and cents. It could help some managers make better decisions about priorities, forecasts and assessments of progress if information is presented in financial terms whenever possible.

Instead of presenting stories and feature estimates in terms of points, Tracker could present them in terms of cost. This could make assessment of priority more intuitive/obvious to some people. Developers would continue to estimate in points, but these could be recast as dollars for presentation to managers.

Velocity could be recast in terms of dollars per point. If there were time tracking, one would know how much developer time cost, then this could be divided by the number of accepted points. This would give a running measure of cost per point. This could then be used to weight point estimates provided by developers.

If rather than just knowing who accepts a story, you knew the composition of the pair working on a story, then you could use actual costs for each developer to measure financial performance. This could be very helpful in a diverse team where some people are consultants, others are employees, and others are offshore developers.

Financial measurement, or even just points, allocated to individuals could be useful even when everyone is working for free on a few venture. This could be used to automatically allocate "equity" based on contributions. Using points assumes everyone's time is of equal value, using nominal dollar amounts (one person works for $1/hr, another works for $1.25/hr) could allow weighting to reflect other factors.