15
votes
Scrum and interruptions (urgent bugs, requests)
Does Scrum take into account interruptions?
Scrum does not. The Scrum team does.
Scrum teams are self-organized and plan their own work. If part of that work consists of fixing urgent bugs from ...
- 15k
13
votes
Accepted
For planning purposes, how many work hours per day should I expect of each staff member?
TL;DR
In general, I recommend a "fudge factor" of 0.75 to baseline a new project, absent other data. This would mean 6 hours of project effort in an 8-hour day. I also recommend a more aggressive ...
- 50.1k
10
votes
What to do when capacity is reduced in the middle of the Sprint? (e.g. Sick Leave)
How to Plan for Unplanned Absences
People get sick, scope changes, and stuff happens. That's why velocity should always be measured as an average or a range, and primarily used as an upper bound on ...
- 50.1k
7
votes
Scrum and interruptions (urgent bugs, requests)
TL;DR
The Scrum framework certainly addresses capacity planning and scheduling, although it's not prescriptive about how the Scrum Team should manage the issues you describe. The implementation ...
- 50.1k
6
votes
Accepted
Measuring team capacity for upcoming sprint on a Scrum Team
One other thing you could look at is past sprint variability. If, in the last 5 sprints (assuming nothing like a holiday is really skewing your numbers) you have an average of 35 points and your high ...
- 16.9k
6
votes
Scrum and interruptions (urgent bugs, requests)
Scrum does address such problems through Inspection & Adaptation.
If your team is wasting a % on repetitive work, it should come up at the end of the sprint as a source of waste. This source of ...
- 8,625
5
votes
Scrum and interruptions (urgent bugs, requests)
The first question is how frequent and impactful are these interruptions. The 2020 revision of the Scrum Guide refers to the Sprint as "the heartbeat of Scrum". If your team is highly ...
- 19k
5
votes
How can I measure team capacity in Kanban?
You have several options. None of them are exclusive to Kanban though. They all work perfectly fine with Scrum too.
Story Points (start where you are!)
Avg. Number of Cards Done / time unit (avg ...
- 1,380
5
votes
What to do when capacity is reduced in the middle of the Sprint? (e.g. Sick Leave)
How can I identify the likelihood of the sprint being still completed
using this new information?
The team should handle this during the first stand-up, or a soon as they notice someone is sick, ...
- 5,543
5
votes
Identifying and considering the important factors to calculate a persons Capacity for a Sprint?
I'm deducing that your team uses story points for an initial estimation then, at the planning meeting, breaks stories into tasks and estimates them at the hour level.
First, some general suggestions:...
- 1,380
4
votes
Identifying and considering the important factors to calculate a persons Capacity for a Sprint?
The Scrum Guide says this on the things to take account of when determining the commitments for the next sprint.
The input to this meeting is the Product Backlog, the latest product Increment, ...
- 1,255
4
votes
Identifying and considering the important factors to calculate a persons Capacity for a Sprint?
TL;DR
Estimate your team's capacity as an aggregate range based on historical performance, rather than as a sum of the ideal hours available to each individual. Furthermore, you should carefully ...
- 50.1k
3
votes
How should we capture "non-implementation" work?
There are typically two ways to use velocity with sprints:
Measure the team's capacity to do work - include all the work the team is doing in your calculations
Measure the team's capacity to deliver ...
- 19.5k
3
votes
How will team changes impact velocity of a Scrum project?
Velocity and Capacity
20% of the team left during the particular sprint. Does the velocity change?
It is likely that your velocity will change because the team's capacity has changed, but a lot ...
- 50.1k
2
votes
For planning purposes, how many work hours per day should I expect of each staff member?
80% is the figure I have always heard, although trying to find internet citations that support that figure is surprisingly difficult and, in fact, I wasn't able to find any!
I have flip-flopped in ...
- 4,424
2
votes
Different Scrum Teams Assisting Each Other - Good or Bad?
My answer and some associated comments (1, 2, 3, 4) appear to have sparked this question.
The original question presented a very specific case - a Scrum team has met their Sprint Goals before the ...
- 19k
2
votes
How can I measure team capacity in Kanban?
TL;DR
In Kanban, you generally aren't measuring "team capacity" because kanbans track queues, not people. The closest you are likely to come to a direct capacity measurement in Kanban in the WIP ...
- 50.1k
2
votes
What to do when capacity is reduced in the middle of the Sprint? (e.g. Sick Leave)
When the whole team is planning their next sprint, slack should be built in for sick leave, meetings, fixing live incidents etc. Over the course of a year, assume most people will take around half of ...
- 2,436
2
votes
Scrum and interruptions (urgent bugs, requests)
If you really have as much as 30% on-demand work then your team might benefit from a Scrumban style approach. Prioritise your work on a board, with priority "buckets" taking the place of ...
- 6,241
2
votes
How should we capture "non-implementation" work?
TL;DR
This question is a close duplicate of What to do with work not on the board?. In my answer to that question, I articulate CodeGnome's Law of Transparency℠: "No invisible work, ever!" ...
- 50.1k
1
vote
Team Velocity and Increasing Capacity
I assume the management is interested in increased capacity within the same team (i.e. delivering more with the same people). This can only happen if you have significant room for your team's flow ...
- 11
1
vote
How should we capture "non-implementation" work?
Why do you need to capture this type of work to predict velocity?
Velocity is the measure of getting valuable work done. You can measure velocity in points, stories, or whatever else. Whatever your ...
- 19k
1
vote
Scrum and interruptions (urgent bugs, requests)
On top of what the previous commenter said that exactly The Scrum team does (plan time for bugfixing and tracking the regression), I would note that not all the bugs are blockers to deliver the ...
- 303
1
vote
How will team changes impact velocity of a Scrum project?
You may be conflating two term here - velocity and capacity. Velocity is only measurable after the sprint and will most certainly be less for this sprint because you are short 2 people (by 20% left I'...
- 16.9k
1
vote
For planning purposes, how many work hours per day should I expect of each staff member?
The best suggestion I would offer to anyone asking this is to ask each team member individually what they want to sign up for. Check in weekly to see if there are changes they want to make to this ...
- 1,455
1
vote
Different Scrum Teams Assisting Each Other - Good or Bad?
There is a lot to unpack in there. The way I read the answer and associated comments, I interpret it as one team helping another gives the team the false impression that they can do more work than ...
- 16.9k
1
vote
Identifying and considering the important factors to calculate a persons Capacity for a Sprint?
Try adopting the LEAN idea of 'waste'
Get the team to record their hours against tasks, meetings, admin etc so that you can work out exactly how much time you are spending on 'non work' tasks each ...
- 926
1
vote
Accepted
Can machine learning be used for capacity planning?
Although, this tool would sell like crazy, it won't be able to handle exceptions and variability (I believe it won't be able to handle vacation period, which is not too complicated for humans). ...
- 11.9k
1
vote
Who decides how much work should be included in each Sprint?
In my opinion, the following factors decides the stories to be included in each sprint.
Product long term vision
Product owner prioritizes the user stories
in advance as per the requirement from ...
- 365
1
vote
Who decides how much work should be included in each Sprint?
The key to not having this sort of problem is in determining the estimates right. One way to have reasonable estimates is to take estimates from each field expert and reason why he or she thinks so. ...
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