Backlog Writing System / Capacity simulation

The sprint, simulated.

The team by name, each person's weekly capacity in points, the stories with their Fibonacci points and what they depend on. Move a story, change a capacity, add a developer: the week the Epic lands moves with it. This is the conversation with the sponsor. The tracker is the record.

Edit the inputs The skill on GitHub

Fictional team and numbers. The rules are real.

Inputs

Edit anything. The plan recomputes on every change and is kept in this browser.

Team

NamePoints per weekRemove

What if

Three questions a sponsor asks. Each one changes the inputs on the left and reports what it did to the landing week.

Stories

Points follow the Fibonacci scale. A story with no points is not scheduled: it goes to the "to refine" list. Depends on takes story codes separated by commas. Enabler marks work that carries little value alone and draws on the reserve.

Code Title Feature Points Owner Band Depends on Enabler Remove

The plan

Derived, never typed. Dependency order first, then the chain that sets the landing week, then whoever is free.

    When each Feature lands

      Who does what, week by week

      F03-US03 5 on the chain that sets the landing weekS1 5 enabler, placed first up to the reserveS3 5 other storyidle 3 capacity left while work waits on a dependency or a sprint boundary

      Parked (Next and Later)

        To refine (no points)

          Features on the board

            How to read this

            The rules the simulation applies, in the order it applies them.

            1. Only Now is scheduled. Next and Later stories are parked. A Now story that depends on a parked one is blocked and reported, because a plan that waits on a decision nobody made is not a plan.
            2. Dependencies set the order. A story starts the week after everything it depends on has finished. Cycles are reported as an error.
            3. The chain goes first. Among stories that can start, the one with the longest path of work behind it is placed first. Inside the same level, the Feature with the higher ROI impact goes first.
            4. A story stays inside a sprint when it can. A person who can finish it before the sprint ends is preferred. When nobody can and the person would otherwise sit idle, the story starts anyway, carries over the boundary, and a note says so: split it. A story bigger than any person's whole sprint is flagged for the same reason.
            5. The reserve protects enabling work. Each sprint, stories marked Enabler are placed first until the reserve share of the team's capacity holds enabling work, so the foundation that waits for the product to finish never has to wait. Nothing is held back from use.
            6. Dates are derived. Weeks count from the start date. Nothing is typed into a card. The landing week is the last week of the last Now story; the chain that sets it is highlighted.
            7. Points per person are a reference, not a measurement. Five points a week is one point per working day; replace it with the team's measured velocity as soon as there is one.
            8. The simulation works in whole weeks: a story that depends on another starts the week after it lands, and a person works one story at a time. A day-level plan of the same stories, like the example's capacity plan, lands about two weeks earlier; the order and the critical chain are the same.

            The method behind this page: Now / Next / Later, ROI impact and the enabling chain. The skill: capacity-simulation. Back to the field guide.