Sprint planning - Points vs Planned Hours

[marclindsay]

In our Agile process we use Points to indicate the level of effort need to complete a story. We use the Fibonacci sequence to assign points to a story. The points are usual assigned at the time the story is created.

During sprint planning, we start estimating the hours needed to actually complete the story. At the same time we know each team members workable hours for the sprint. This way we can tell if someone within the team is over their available capacity for this sprint. 

The points is what is used to determine a teams velocity, but the hours help to make sure that a person is not over booked during detailed estimating / sprint planning. 

Question is how are you able to do both Story points and Sprint Capacity planning (planning hours per resource per story) within Agile Development 2.0 ? So far I have seeing documentation that indicates the following :  

Team Velocity Chart: displays a chart that calculates how much product backlog effort a team can handle over multiple sprints. Team capacity is measured with whatever units the organization prefers (such as points per sprint, hours per sprint, or stories per sprint). 

trying to figure out how you do both Points per Sprint and Hours per Sprint as two different measurements in a Sprint?

Thanks 

Marc...

[shankarkattaman]

Today, Points cannot be given at Resouce level hence Person Hours as it defeats the purpose of Agile. If I am right resource planning should not be done in Agile development. We always look as teams.

We can manually enter team capacity in story points, would Points to hours conversion at team level help. 

Need some inputs from the community while doing detailed estimating do you really expect planning hours per resource per story or we leave it to team level? 

Also, if a couple of members in the team have "timeoff" for 2 sprints, would you want to reflect updating team capacity so that when detail planning it helps on how many stories to pick.

[petrb]

Hi Marc, this is actually very interesting question. To my knowledge, we use story points in Agile Development to estimate complexity of user requirements (stories). On the other side PPM leverages Resource Management, where we assign resources against project (btw. stories can be assign to a project). After that we do resource booking and allocation of human resources for the project. After the story is executed then a time is recoded against project or story via timesheet portal. Now, here is the point. I have not figureed out yet, the best way of aligning story points with hours, apart from manual story points recollection based on reported (actual) timesheet hours. If you figure out better approach, please let me know. Thanks 🙂

Petr

[marclindsay]

Yes points are at the team level, and help with Velocity Product planning (long-term, work that can be accomplished for multiple sprints).  Hours help more when Sprint planning (short-term, amount of work in one specific sprint ). 

The Velocity is an average and help with long term planning, Hours help with determining what will be delivered at the end of a specific sprint.  

This article explains the difference of points to hours related to my question here. 

https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/why-i-dont-use-story-points-for-sprint-planning

Hope this helps explain more on what I am trying to accomplish here.