Edit Configurations

Edit will take users to the ”Capacity Settings” which offers various configurations. The details of the capacity settings are described below.

Open

Disabled edit button indicates that Capacity Tracker’s Jira permission feature is enabled for your instance by your Jira administrator and you do not have write permissions to edit the configurations.

Board Configurations

The board configurations have two major features 1) Team Working Days and 2) Team Holiday in the Iteration.

This setting are used to filter out weekends, holidays, and other times during which your team might not be working on your board's project(s).

Team working days: Default team working days are Monday to Friday. You can change team working days from capacity settings page.

Team Holidays in iteration: Lists user defined public holidays and general unavailability of the entire team for the selected iteration.

Member Configurations

Displays the list of members configured and tracked for the selected iteration.

Highlighted on each member are their “role” and “daily capacity”.

Shown as well are the “remaining working days” and “days off left” in the iteration. Clicking on “remaining working days” and “days off left” will open a pop-up displaying the exact dates and details.

If you have any questions on the statistics displayed here, the answers lies in the configurations. Please refer to the Capacity Settings page to review the team’s and members' configurations. Also review calculation breakdown as described in #9.

Export

Users can export the configuration and capacity/work allocation details into a CSV file. This can be useful for users who want historical record keeping, custom reporting, etc.

Iteration Selection

Allow users to change the iteration selection view. This drop down lists current and future sprints or releases for selection.

If you would like to see an overview of multiple iterations at once; you can select one of the following options.

1. “All Sprints“ : To view aggregated capacity for all the sprints.

2. “Active Sprints“ : To view aggregated capacity of all Active sprints.

3. “Custom Selection“: To view aggregated capacity of specific multi-selected group of sprints.

Iteration Capacity Summary

This is an aggregated team capacity bar chart. It incorporates the total availability of the listed team members and their total work allocation in the selected iteration.

The unit of representation is in person hours. E.g. (140h of 168h) means 140 person-hours of work has been assigned/planned/underway to the listed team members who has total 168 person-hours of availability collectively. If users change the “Capacity Type“ configurations to Story Points from Capacity Settings page, the unit of representation will be changed to Story Points.

RED color indicates that your team is over allocated, so there is a risk to completion that requires your attention. GREEN indicates capacity and work allocation is under control. It can also indicate that your team has some free capacity to take up additional work.

Role Capacity Summary

This bar chart will be only available if you have assigned a role to a team member. It helps you to find out a role’s specific work allocation issues, either bottlenecks and/or opportunities.

E.g. Often teams come across a situation where Developers have enough capacity to complete their work, but QA becomes a bottleneck, therefore you may not be able to complete and release the work at the end of the iteration.

It can also help in identifying free capacity of a specific role and utilizing them for the alternate activities or the future iteration.

Team Members Capacity Summary

This is the most desired chart everyone would like to see and monitor. It lists the total capacity and work allocation per team member for the selected iteration. It helps you know who is under-allocated or over-allocated. It helps you figure out potential risks due to imbalanced work distribution.

RED color indicates that your team member is over allocated, so there could be a risk to completion that requires your attention. GREEN indicates capacity and work allocation is under control. It can also indicate that your team member has some free capacity to take up additional work.

This chart plotting will differ based on the capacity type selection hours vs story points, as a user you have a choice to make which metrics is more useful and meaningful to your project/product and track it accordingly.

Calculation Breakdown

This info bar will open a pop-up window which will display a full detailed calculation breakdown and log. This allow users to deep dive in to how the calculation is made and investigate if any questions raises in the summary view. This is a detailed logging that users can use as a help, reference material or troubleshooting guide.

Click on the info icon to open the Calculation Breakdown.

Team member Capacity and Allocation Details

This is the most granular level of the capacity planning and tracking. You can dig deep into work allocation by stacking chart. It will show you the exact work allocation along with its effort value.

Please Note: the pre-requisite inputs to these data are:

1. Sub-task allocation

2. Remaining estimate field correctly filled.

Unassigned Tasks for Review

The Capacity tracker will list all the sub-tasks and stories that have been planned and estimated for the iteration but haven’t been allocated to any team members. This feature allows teams to quickly spot and assign them to appropriate team members for timely completion.

Note: The tracker will not list tasks that do not have the remaining estimate field properly filled.

Board Configuration > Capacity Type

Capacity type configuration allows users to select either “hours” or “story point” as a primary unit of capacity configuration and work tracking.

If you select the capacity type as “hours“ then the daily capacity will be calculated as hours/day, if you select the capacity type as “story points“ then the daily capacity will be calculated as StoryPoints/day.

Board Configurations > Default Working Days

Capacity Tracker assumes you are working 5 days a week i.e. Monday to Friday. You can chage this setting for your iterations that has special conditions.

Default working days are board specific configurations. You do not have to configure this setting for each iteration. The defaults are all working days i.e. Monday to Friday. This setting applies to the entire team, however you can set custom working days for an individual team members.

Board Configuration > Team Holidays

Users can define public holidays and general unavailability of the entire team. This configuration is global in nature, meaning once you add Team Holidays in any iteration it will be applied to all iterations in the selected project board.

This feature however only supports single time zone teams, so if you have geographically distributed teams who each have different public holidays per region, then it is best to add them as days off at the individual level instead of using the company holidays.

Adding past holidays retrospectively is not allowed and neither are they kept for historical purposes.

Iteration Configurations

Iteration configuration displays duration start and end date. This field is non-editable for the active sprints which are already in progress. Since Jira does not allow to select start and end date for the future sprints in scrum template, you can use this setting for configurable start and end date for the future sprints. Note: Jira allows to set dates for the active and future versions. Capacity Tracker uses versions in Kanban setup hence these dates can be set directly from Jira. They will be read-only in the Capacity Tracker for Kanban boards.

The virtual start and end dates are overruled by the JIRA configured start and end date once you start the iteration through the board view.

Member Configurations > View & Import Users

This feature finds and highlights additional users with work allocation, but are not configured here. It provides enhanced ability to add or remove users from the iteration board.

As a default functionality, team members with any remaining estimate work allocation will be automatically listed in the “View” and you can bulk import them to the Capacity Tracker. But if you want to add or remove a team member explicitly without any work allocation constraints from “Add users”.

Member Configurations > Role

Use pre-defined roles or create custom roles for the team members.

This feature is useful if you want to aggregate the capacity and work allocation at a role level. The functionality is simple. Once you assign a role to a team member e.g. Developer or QA, it will roll up all the capacity based on their collective availability for the sprint and it will also aggregate the total work assigned based on the individual sub-task allocation and its estimates. If you do not wish to use and monitor the role level aggregated capacity and allocation then just keep the roles blank.

We have set some default options (Analysis, Dev, Test, UX). Because these do not fit all use cases we also have implemented a way to add your own roles. The Custom option allows you to create your own category, however as it is not stored in a database the workings will be a bit different than a usual add/change/remove process.

Indeed, we only store the role in the user configuration, meaning that we will parse the configuration each time you load the page and collect all unknown roles as Custom. After a role modification, if the “count” of a custom role (the amount of users that uses this particular role) reaches 0, the custom role will disappear from the dropdown selection after the next reload.

So if you’d like to modify a role, you will need to create a new Custom role, assign all the users in this sprint that used the former to the new role and reload. This will effectively remove the previous role from the dropdown. The same operation will work to delete a role.

Member Configurations > Working Days

This is a custom setting to configure custom working days for the team member if they are different than the standard team working days.

It represents the number of workdays in the iteration applicable to selected team member. This is useful to teams which are not following typical Mon-Fri schedule, or have contractors that works on different working days setup than usual.

BLUE color indicates that team member’s working days are in sync with the team’s default working days. GREEN color indicates team member has custom working days that are different than team’s default working days.

Member Configurations > Days Off

This is a calendar, it allows to add days off for the individual team members. It supports both full days and half days.

Please note that you won’t be able to add days off retrospectively i.e. Past dates are greyed out in the calendar and you will not be able to select and add those dates as days off.

The days off calendar widget has been further improved to display the number of days off remaining in the iteration for the given team member. Hence, it will accurately reflect in the available team capacity throughout the iteration duration.

Member Configurations > Daily Capacity

Daily capacity represents the daily availability of each team member for work. (e.g. X Hrs/day or X StoryPoints/day throughout the iteration). It is basically the number of hours or story points a team member is committed to work on a daily basis towards his iteration goals.

This is an iteration (sprint/version) specific configuration, meaning you can select different daily capacity in various iterations for the same team member.

Also, you can distribute the daily capacity for the team members among multiple projects if he/she is a shared resources or working on multiple assignments. e.g. Team member A can be set for 4hrs/day for project 1, and remaining 4 hrs/day for project 2.

Iteration Selection

Allows you to change the iteration selection while remaining in the capacity settings page. Note: Before switching the iteration, ensure to click on “save“ button to persist any changes you may have made.

Save & Close

Saves the modifications of the selected iteration and navigates user back to the home screen i.e. listing page.

“Cancel” will close Capacity Settings without saving any changes and will redirect the user to Tracking page.

“Save & Close” will save any configurations changes made and will redirect the user to Tracking page.

“Save” button will save the changes; user stays on the Capacity Settings page.