Capacity Planning

Capacity Planning is a tool that enables you to track teams, their capacities, and their delivery performance.

Based on this information, Capacity Planning will calculate an estimate for the teams' delivery for upcoming sprints.

Group your teams into squads to get summary information of a squads achievements, commitments and predicted output for future sprints.

View a team's velocity across multiple sprints to see how they can be expected to perform in upcoming sprints.

Record the availability of team members to calculate team capacity for your sprints to produce more refined estimates. Especially helpful around public holidays when there will be large changes in developers availability.

Capacity Planning will produce predictability measures for your teams to help identify teams that are struggling to estimate how much work they can do in a sprint.

Manage Your Teams

If you have multiple Teams, you can organise them into Squads, this makes finding a team easier and also allows for reporting on the performance of a Squad.

Add developers to Teams so you can manage their availablility through the Capacity screen. Each team will need at least one developer in order to estimate the team's velocity in upcoming sprints.

Manage Your Sprints

Capacity Planning uses data from up to three completed sprints in order to produce estimates for future sprints.

Although you'd typically run sprints that are of a consistent length, Capacity Planning allows you to change the length of any or all sprints. This will enable you to switch to a new sprint length whilst still being able to produce realistic estimates for the new sprint duration.

Manually mark when a sprint has started and Capacity Planning will tell you how many teams are missing Actual (Done) data for the previous sprint, How many are missing Committed data for the current sprint and if there are missing estimates for the next sprint.. if you've got missing estimates then you probably haven't created the next sprint!

Once you have at least 10 sprints in the past you can purge the old sprints. This will delete the data for these older sprints, but will make selecting and viewing sprints both easier and faster. Of course you're never forced to purge, so that choice is left to you.

Note: Only Actuals from the current / past sprints will be used for calculating estimates, so changing the current Sprint in the Sprints screen is likely to change the estimates for future sprints.

Manage Your Team's Capacity

Record the developers' availability for each sprint. Keeping track of when developers are available for development will help to calculate their team's estimated velocity in future sprints.

If a developer was off sick or had to take unanticipated leave, then go back and reduce their capacity for that sprint. It will be reflected in the estimate for the upcoming sprint!

If you thought a team of 10 could produce 100 points of work, if one of the developers is off sick for half the sprint and the team still did 100 points of work, then you know they are capable of doing more when at full capacity!

All of this is taken into account and used in producing the estimated velocity for upcoming sprints.

Team Velocity

This is the core of Capacity Planning. Record the team commitments for each sprint, along with what they actually achieved (Actual).

Capacity Planning will then use the Capacity information you've entered for past, present and future sprints, along with historic Actuals to estimate upcoming sprint velcoties for each team.

Choose to see this information by Sprint, and selecting a Sprint will show you all the Teams within your selected Squad.

You'll also be show the Squad's collective estimate, commitment and actuals for the sprint. When both commitments and actuals have been recorded you will also be show the Squad's predictability based on both their Commitment and the estimated velocity (so you can see how accurate both the Capacity Planning tool is and the team's commitment is compared to their actual outcome).

Team Velocity by Team

When looking at Velocity, you can also choose to focus on a single team.

This option gives you the ability to easily see how that team has performed over a range of sprints.

Using this view may make it easier to spot problem trends with a team, as well as give you a clear view of when a team is performing consistently well.

Another advantage of this view is that it enables you to easily and quickly enter a lot of historic data for a team when first populating Capacity Planning with a team's performance details.