
Ask HN: What do you use to plan a sprint? - softwareman
Something which takes care of:<p>- Teams availability, holidays etc.<p>- Shows free time available per team member (after applying the cost for each task assigned)
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chupa-chups
Prior to the planning the scrum master informs us about the 3-month-average of
story points per sprint. We don't do any normalization on the raw story point
value like reducing for vacations etc, we rely on the average.

We plan sprints by at first discussing team availability, which includes time
required for trainings, off-time for vacations etc.

Next we discuss the backlog items considering who will probably work on which
items.

After that we estimate how many story points we will probably manage, both by
gut feeling as well as based on the probable task distribution.

This works quite well for us, we usually complete the sprint goals and only
seldomly have to add new tasks into a ongoing sprint. If we don't manage to
complete the sprint goals it is mostly caused by unexpected events or
technical difficulties.

We are in the SaaS business.

