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I want to introduce Scrum to my group of devs. We are students and some of us have jobs. Our availability of dev hours is not ideal but Scrum seems to be very good for us.

Do we need to know exactly how many hours a week each of us can invest in the project?

If so, would it be better to keep these hours consistent? e.g. 3 hours on Monday, 2 hours on Tuesday each week of a sprint, etc

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Many Scrum teams use Story Point estimations, which removes the need for hour level tracking/estimation. So, no, you don't need to know the number of hours up front. After the first iteration you should be able to get a rough baseline of your team's capacity.

It would be best if your team gave consistent hours each iteration. That way, your get a better forecast of what you're capable of accomplishing in an iteration, but even if you don't, it should "come out in the wash" over time.

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    Agree, Event in normal projects some people take vacation or get sick. You cannot force the constant availability. More important is to know if the velocity variation is more caused by varying team capacity or there is another reason you should pay attention to. – MasterPJ May 11 '16 at 12:19
  • And figuring that out can be very difficult if the team's availability is constantly changing @MasterPJ. ++ mate – RubberDuck May 11 '16 at 13:43
  • It really depends on the level of variation. If one iteration we had capacity 10 days and velocity 20 and the next we had capacity 8 days and velocity 10 one can assume that there is another important influence rather then variation of team's capacity. Nevertheless, finding bottleneck of team progress in a matter of Retrospection. – MasterPJ May 11 '16 at 14:20
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I prefer more of a Kanban approach. Have you all agreed on the priorities? If you stack rank your features in priority order (e.g., A needs to be done before B, and G is way down the list) then the amount of time spent becomes less important. It doesn't really matter if A is going to take twice as long to complete as B if everyone agrees that it's the most important thing and should be done first.

It's better to have 1 feature 100% complete than 4 stories 25% complete (or even 80% complete).

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