When using BigPicture, is there a way to look at capacity by test stations/HW rather than people?

Kara Heuer

I am interested in looking at the capacity of our test stations through the tasks on our Roadmap. Each task has a test station that it can be run on. There may be competing tasks for the same test station, which is why capacity analysis would be useful.

Marcin Geb _SoftwarePlant_

Hi Kara,

sorry for the late response. I'm not sure whether I got your situation right, but when I'm considering your tasks competing for the test stations that are in limited supply, I imagine these test stations could simply constitute a team in BP. A team of test stations, just like a team of humans.

And so you could use Resources and Reports modules to analyze the test stations' capacities and performance, just like you would do with humans or teams. Say, each test station has a capacity of 40 hours per week, or, perhaps, 10 tests per week. If you use 'test' as a unit, then you could use BigPicture story points, to reflect the uncertainty of how much time a particular test will take.

Trying to recreate your setup on the screenshot below, nothing special, but the green bars mean that Test stations 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 are still underloaded, so you could assign more tasks to them, this sort of thinking.

 

Fig 1 BigPicture Resources