Suppose history indicates my team can do 25 points of work in the next Sprint. I want to have a place to enter this value (25 points) into the Sprint definition, and have V1 show me how much room is left when I add items to the Sprint backlog, with something to indicate overfilling should we go over the limit.
This functionality almost exists: The "Target Estimate" field in the Sprint behaves exactly in this way. However, if the Sprint definition is shared across multiple projects, the Target Estimate is also shared, which makes no sense--the value should be different for each project. Make this value different for each project, and I think you've got it.
This capability is useful for ScrumMasters to assist with Sprint planning, as it eliminates the need to do these calculations externally to the product.
by: Kevin T. | over a year ago | Sprint Planning
Comments
We have the same problem:
Our teams are delivering stories for different projects as well as maintainance-stories.
We have a dedicated department which plans how much "velocity" each project could get for the upcoming sprints of the differenet teams. So they are able to detect possible bottlenecks in an early stage. Currently they are using Excel-spreadsheets for this work, but it would be a great benefit for them to have this information already in VersionOne, as the delivery-managers are only updating data in this system.
I'm not sure I agree with the following: "However, if the Sprint definition is shared across multiple projects, the Target Estimate is also shared, which makes no sense--the value should be different for each project."
My team works across multiple projects and the velocity is per-team, not per-project. In a given sprint, we may spend more time on this project or that project, but the velocity for the team as a whole doesn't change.
TeamRoom addresses this concern at the team level. A planned velocity is shown with each sprint; this represents the estimate sum of all the backlog items from the TeamRoom's project context that are currently assigned to the sprint. You can drag items from the backlog panel into a sprint-based panel and the planned velocity will update itself to reflect the latest.
Further, the backlog panel in TeamRoom provides a suggestion of sprint sizes by drawing lines in the backlog according to the team's average velocity and the estimated items in the backlog.
See the Fall 2012 release notes for more details:
http://community.versionone.com/Release%20Notes/ReleaseNotes2012Fall.aspx