Greenhopper - Agile Board - Developer work load.

[Morten Schmidt]

Hi

We are trying to adopt the new Agile Board however i dont quite get how to quickly view each employees workload.
Maybe this is not the purpose of the Agile Planning Board ? But the old board made this quite easy.

[Michael Reust · Accepted solution]

I don't think we need to get all theoretical about scrum best practices. Simple fact, it would be useful to see the story points assigned on a per person basis during planning and during the sprint in general.

Yes, it's up to the team to not let this devalue the sprint as a team goal. But for example, it would be useful for me as a manager to make sure certain people don't pull off too much work for themselves.

If I wanted to use a tool that forced a philosophy on me I'd use Pivotal Tracker; Jira + Greenhopper should give me the ability to view this data quickly.

[Renjith Pillai]

Probably you should start reading http://www.scrumalliance.org/articles/52-empowering-teams-the-scrummasters-role

It is natural to tend towards ScrumBut but we should try our best to stick to the original concepts and principles.

I would say, trying to control how team's tries to do the work, will eventually result in a disfunctional team and the sprint goal becomes a managers goal rather than a team goal. And there is no concept of story points assigned to a member. It is always a team velocity that is measured rather than an individual velocity. And that value has only meaning in Release planning, not for any other purpose like comparing teams.

Just an opinion.

[boardtc]

Do you know about the user workload report? Go to the project page and select the reports menu, it's the first one. More info at https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/User+Workload+Report

[Doron Gutman]

This is a must for us as well - I have a multi-functional team, with developers from various technologies.
As the scrum master, I have to know if each member of the team is over/under committed, and I can't understand how to do it using the new boards.

[Morten Schmidt]

We have ended up using the planning board, but making filters for every employee, we need to me able to see the alottet workload while planning, we estimate 1 week of work for all of our employees every two weeks.

The filtering works, but is not as convinient as the old planning board which had employee grouping built in.

[Andre Brissette]

Another good way as a Scrum Master to know if a team member is over/under commited is to simply ask him at the daily meeting :-)

[Renjith Pillai]

And in pure scrum methods there is never an upfront planning of tasks of to individuals. It is a common backlog (I mean the sprint backlog) and all the team members works towards burning it down. At any given point in time, there should not be more that 1-2 tasks with an individual. If everything is being pre-fixed at sprint planning it is a very bad practice which will slow down the team as a whole. Members start worrying only about their tasks creating silos and forgetting about the sprint goal for the team as a whole

[boardtc]

A (rapid) board in work mode can work the same as the old task board. You can configure the same columns to show for example. Have you tried this?