Sprint Planning and allocation

Question

Hello,

In our sprints, we would like to allocate work according to a set percentage on buckets/categories that we have.

for example:

Category A: 35%

Category: B: 25%

Category C: 20%

Category D:  20%

Under these categories we would have the stories with story points following the above allocation where we tie to a total commitment like 50 points to a sprint.

So the story points under Category A would be 35% x 50 = 18

These 18 points could be 3 issues, 4 issues, 5 etc.

So when it comes to sprint planning, is there a tool to visualise this?  I can easily do in excel but, that's two different apps so would love to have something in JIRA itself.

Thanks!

Anthony Thamel · Answer

Hello Walter, thanks for your suggestions. Specifically, the adding a custom field to identify the category is something I have thought of because, it would enable me to isolate categories to review further.

To explain further, the team is essentially the same and for a set sprint, the idea is to have an assortment of issues so that all the relevant categories are covered in a given sprint. That way, the work gets done in a sprint for all relevant categories which means not only one category gets completed at the end of quarter for example. So this is why we plan include a certain % from category A, B and so forth.

Again, thanks for your inputs.

Walter Buggenhout · Answer

Hi @Anthony Thamel,

Starting with an answer to your question: there is no to visualise how much work you have assigned across categories in a sprint.

There are different ways to organise your work by category to help you do something like this:

* You could consider adding a custom field to your issues to define what category they belong to and add quick filters to your board so you can filter the issues in your sprint / backlog so you can plan by category. 
* You could use epics as a way to group your issues and use those in a similar way to plan epic by epic.

However, I am having a hard time understanding the rationale behind your use case. At best, I can assume you have different people doing the work across these different categories - and inherently you have a certain capacity available in your team(s) to do a certain amount of work. If that's the case, why don't you split the work across different projects / boards and let every category team run its own sprints there?

Your team's velocity should essentially be something that you measure, rather than trying to impose it or carve into a business rule to set targets, if you know what I mean. It will not be steady over time, for sure.

Hope this helps!