Proper Jira Agile planning

[Dan McGowan]

We are trying to use Jira Agile and have been running into problems identifying how big of a Sprint to make, or which days to use as the Start/End dates of the Sprint.

It comes down to having no clear view for if we are over-allocating the team.

2 things to point out:

Our teams are not always going to stay the same size. And team members might be shared across multiple teams with partial allocation, thus might have multiple Sprints to watch.

So to the main question, how can we know when we reached the proper allocation when planning the Agile Sprints. For example a team has 5 developers, and we make a sprint that is about a month. This would equal 4 weeks times 5 developers and total 20 weeks of tickets based on Original Estimate. However that is really 4 dedicated developers and 2 that are shard at 50% between this Epic and another. The actual resources could be 4 or 6, depending on completion dates for either Epic.

I see plenty of documentation discussing teams, but no mention for how teams are tracked with Agile. Does Agile assume/prefer a rather static team structure? Our company has a very fluid development team and we are having trouble grasping allocation. Any ideas or features we are missing would be great.

Thank you.

[Subhendu Chattopadhyay]

My two cents will be to keep the sprint length same. You are working with too many variable. Once you make the sprint time boxed ( all your sprint same length - 3wks or 4wks) work out other factor.

My suggestion will be to maintain an excel with no. of team members worked in sprint and how many story points they delivered. You can calculate velocity /person and use that for planning future sprint. At sprint planning decide how many story point can current team deliver.

Also, changing the team, multitasking reduce the productivity. You can use the time tracking report to check the load of individual user in Jira.