Is it possible to retrieve sprint capacity history ?

[Andrei Eleodor Sirbu]

Hello everyone,

Sprint capacity in plans is a great feature but I cannot find a way to retrieve historic values from past sprints.

Sprint story points commited and resolved don't mean much if we cannot check the history of capacity for each team. For the moment we have to write them down manually in excel but maybe there's a way we can see historic values in Jira ? 

Thanks a lot

Andrei Eleodor Sirbu

[Walter Buggenhout · Accepted solution]

Hi @Andrei Eleodor Sirbu,

Unless you explicitly record this somewhere - as you are currently doing - I can't think of a way to do this immediately.

At the same time, why would you want to do this? Capacity is typically something useful when you are planning ahead. The data you get from story points resolved gives you the velocity of your team over time. If you look at this just during the holiday season with large differences in your team capacity, I can understand what you are saying; however, over a longer period of time your team should grow into a more predictable velocity, helping you plan ahead more comfortably.

Apart from using Excel, you could also consider taking a look at your normal team velocity and making notes of your assumptions during sprint planning / evaluating them during your sprint retro as well. That may help you formalise and evaluate your assumptions until you grow confident about what your team can do (at full and at reduced capacity).

Hope this helps!

[Andrei Eleodor Sirbu]

Hi Walter thank you for your answer :)

We're working with more than 20 Scrum teams in a SAFe context with lots of holidays, sick leaves, increase or decrease in staffing and capacity is a valuable indicator because teams need to calculate their capacity for the upcoming PI iterations. 

Once they have the capacity they can better commit a number of story points for each iteration. Using only story points committed and story points resolved gives us an idea of the team velocity indeed, but if you don't compare the outcome to initial capacity you don't know if the team committed to their maximum capacity, below or above. Furthermore, some teams need to reserve 15% of their capacity for bug resolution, others do not. 

And I totally agree with teams becoming more and more predictable with time, but currently not all teams have the same level of auto organization and experience with the frameworks at hand. 

Have a great day 

Andrei

[Danut M _StonikByte_]

Salut @Andrei Eleodor Sirbu,

Jira does not offer the possibility of adding capacity per sprint. You could eventually search on Atlassian Marketplace for apps that let you set sprint capacity. 

But, in my opinion, by definition, every agile team should commit close to its available capacity. Remember that one of the Scrum values is "Commitment". And the Scrum Master should take care of this to happen during the sprint planning meeting.

Assuming this, you could solve your problem by using a velocity chart like the one from our Team Velocity gadget offered by our Great Gadgets app. 

As you can see this chart offers an Initial Scope and a Final Scope series.

Initial Scope is the initial commitment, when the sprint started. And, if your team did a real and fair commitment close to its capacity for that sprint, you can use this series for the team capacity history. 

Final Scope - is the sprint scope after eventual scope changes, so the "commitment at the end of the sprint", if we can name it like this.

Does it make sense?

Because you use SAFe, see this gadget better explained in the SAFe context in this article: How to track scaled-agile (SAFe) projects in Jira with Great Gadgets app. 

Danut.  

[Henri Seymour _Easy Agile_]

> Remember that one of the agile values is "Commitment". 

@Danut M _StonikByte_ what does "Commitment" mean in an agile context here? Is this an interpretation of the Agile Manifesto or its 12 principles? Or another school of agile thought? 

[Danut M _StonikByte_]

Hi @Henri Seymour _Easy Agile_,

I was referring to "commitment" as one of the 5 Scrum values. Thanks for asking; I made this clear in my answer. 

https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/scrum-values#:~:text=The%20five%20Scrum%20values%20are,successfully%20and%20meet%20project%20goals. 

https://www.scrum.org/resources/scrum-values

Danut.

[Andrei Eleodor Sirbu]

Salut Danut, thanks for your answer

We're currently importing commitment values from excel into EazyBI and cross this data with Jira sprint data. We'll look into Great Gadgets app too and see to what extent it will help us. 

Kind regards

Andrei