Capacity calculation: highly anticipated and finally here! From now on, you can calculate the capacity of each user while planning Releases, Iterations, and Team Iterations. Finally, you will be able to see if a user is overloaded with tasks, or if they can take on more work in this particular iteration.
Capacity Calculation feature is an evolution of People Capacity views.
This will make it so much easier to plan your resources across one or many projects. We didn't forget those who work part-time, or those who are allocated by n% of their time for a particular project and period of time.
Available capacity will be summarized across one or many projects based on:
- Remaining work days in a “work container” (Release/Iterations/Team Iteration)
- Weekly available hours by user
- User allocations, if there are any
Let’s dig into a few cases and see what it looks like.
Case 1: One Project, no Allocations
This is the easiest way to plan resources if you have one project and don't use allocations.
On Boards where you see cards grouped by users and Releases/Iterations/Team Iterations, you will notice a small box in the left corner of a cell. It shows Assigned Effort.
When you move cards from the Backlog to a Release, the values for the effort and capacity are updated:
To check the details of effort to do and capacity, click on the left corner of a cell:
If some supported cards are not being displayed on a board (perhaps there are some filters applied), and there is some hidden work assigned to you, the cell will show the aggregate sum of all assigned effort, including hidden cards.
If at least one of the users is allocated to a Project you should allocate others as well. Otherwise, capacity of users with missing allocation will be calculated with 0% availability. More infromation: How are Personal Capacity Limits Calculated?
Case 2: More than one Project + Allocations
Let’s now plan a Cross-Project Release (the scope can include work from one or more projects).
Admin User allocations mean that he can dedicate 280 hours to Core Banking and 40 hours to Risk Scoring:
You can click on a few cards and see the sum of their effort to do. This is especially convenient when moving a few stories from the backlog!
Supported Entities
Work Scopes
Capacity and Assigned Effort totals can be calculated for work items assigned to Releases / Sprints (Iterations) / Team Iterations, and within each of the work scopes an independent calculation is performed.
Work Items
Capacity can be calculated for Effort of User Stories, Bugs, Tasks and Test Plan Runs.
Data Source and Updates
Assigned Effort totals are calculated as a sum of EffortToDo values of RoleEfforts collection. As soon as the progress of a work item increases, its assigned effort decreases. Assigned Effort of Done items is always 0. More information: How is Progress calculated for work items?
The value sums up the Effort ToDo values of the Roles under which the person is assigned to the User Stories. Say, hours of Developer effort only when the person is assigned as Developer and hours of QA effort when the person is assigned as a QA Engineer.
For example, a task is estimated as 5h for Developer role and 0h for QA Engineer role. You assign John White as QA Engineer to this task. Then in the People Capacity view the card of the task will be shown in the row of John White's assignments. However, the total assigned effort for John White in the row header will be still 0h.
Capacity values are calculated using the number of working days remaining until the end of the work scope period (Release / Sprint (Iteration) / Team Iteration). For non-started periods the capacity values are maximal. When the work scope period is current (in progress), then capacity decreases day by day. For past work scope periods, personal Capacity is always 0. More information: How are Personal Capacity Limits Calculated?
Known Limitations
If you have more than 500 cards in one cell, the total effort will be calculated by the first 500.
Capacity is calculated in hours only. When you assign to a person entities having effort estimated in points, personal capacity is not decreased.
The calculations do not take into account the planned start and end dates assigned to work items directly. Start and end dates of work scopes the work items are assigned to are used in calculations instead.
Parallel Releases, Sprints, Team Iterations do not affect each other when personal capacity limits are calculated.
Troubleshooting
Assigned Effort / Capacity label is not shown in a cell when the total assigned effort of the cards is 0.
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