Plan and create an iteration

Once we’ve prioritized the stories, created accurate estimations, and determined if the stories are ready to be worked on, it’s time to plan the iteration. From the Backlog, click on the Plan Iteration button. A new section appears above the list of stories. First, we need to give our iteration a name, start date, end date, and goal.

Now we’ll determine focus and capacity. Begin by figuring out the capacity for this iteration or, in other words, how many hours of work your team has available between your start and end date. For example, since there are four full-time employees on our team scheduled for 40 hours a week and our iteration is two weeks long, our capacity will be 320. That’s 40 hours times 4 people times 2 weeks. Focus is a percentage of the capacity. It’s determined by deciding how busy our team is with other responsibilities. Even though the majority of people work a 40-hour week, we know that 100% of that time isn’t spent on task-oriented work. We need to account for things like email, meetings, known PTO, et cetera. We’ll put our focus for this iteration at 70%, meaning that team members commit to using 70% of the time they’re in the office to working on these specific tasks. Okay, we’ve filled in all the fields in the iteration planning dialogue box. We can see in the bottom right corner of the window that our capacity was multiplied by our focus, giving us the total hours, or points, available for this iteration. If the work required to accomplish all of our ready stories exceeds our total hours available for this iteration, we’ll see those stories highlighted in red in the list, and we have a decision to make as a team. Can we handle an extra story or two that will cause us to extend our available capacity or should we remove it from this iteration? We recommend leaving some wiggle room for issues that come up, so let’s go ahead and remove the last story. Deselect the story by unchecking the box on the far left side of the story row. Now that we’ve planned our iteration, let’s click Save to kick it off. We’re immediately taken to the Iterations tab. -