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Planning for Uncertainty

Agile projects often have a high degree of uncertainty; namely there are absent features and time estimates that have a high probability of adversely impacting the business. To avoid a negative impact, estimates should be buffered to reflect levels of uncertainty that are intrinsic in estimation activities. Let’s discuss the various types of buffers used to minimize uncertainty during planning with Agile Methods.

Sprint Planning Buffer

The rationale for conducting an Agile Planning meeting is for the purposes of presenting the User Stories to the Agile Team for estimation. The outcome of this meeting is the team being aligned with the business objective. The team is expected to be committed to accomplishing the work required to complete the User Stories in the Sprint Backlog. The first and most important process in the Agile Planning meeting should be determining the team’s velocity. A methods for calculating the team’s velocity is:

The team’s capacity can be calculated based on the following formula:

  1. (Number of team members) X (Number of days in the iteration) X (6 hours)

During the Planning meeting, team members who have planned vacation time during the approaching Sprint, should be identified and captured as a “vacation user story”. This user story should have tasks that represent each team member’s time out of the office. This will account for some of the team’s velocity, represented as user stories during the committed process of planning. Once the Sprint is in progress and the vacation days have approached, the burndown chart will reflect the vacation days tasks as being completed along with other tasks. The burndown chart will correctly reflect the team’s velocity due to vacation and time away from the office. As an example, we use a six-member Agile Team that is planning a 10-day Sprint to calculate the capacity of the team:

(6 members) X (10 days) X (6 hours per day) = 360 hours capacity.

Recommended Further Reading

The following materials may assist you in order to get the most out of this course:

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