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Sprint Capacity Calculator

How many hours the team really has this sprint

Add everyone, take out the days they are away and the time ceremonies eat, then apply a focus factor so the total reflects real working hours rather than the shape of the calendar. Everything is worked out in this browser and saved on your device.

Team size
0
10 working days in the sprint
Focus-adjusted hours
0.0 h
0.0 h raw at 70%
Suggested points
not set
enter a past sprint below
Biggest constraint
no team yet
add someone to the roster

Team roster

Nobody on the roster yet. Add each person who will work on sprint items, including part-timers and anyone shared with another team, and give them the hours a day they genuinely have. Load the five-person example to see how the numbers behave.

From hours to a commitment

raw, adjusted, then points

Add someone with hours against them to see the totals.

Treat the suggested number as a ceiling, not a target. It is the most the team could deliver if nothing went wrong, and something always goes wrong. Commit below it and pull more work in when the sprint proves you had room.

Where the constraint sits

least available first

Add the roster to see who has the least time and what that does to the plan.

Sprint settings

applies to everyone
70% focus factor

Points conversion

optional

Dividing hours by points gives an hours-per-point ratio for this team and this kind of work. It does not transfer to another team, because their points mean something else.

How the figures are worked out

Each person gets the sprint days minus their days off, multiplied by their hours a day, minus the ceremony hours, with a floor of zero. Those totals are summed for the raw team figure, and the focus factor is applied to the sum.

The suggested commitment is the adjusted hours divided by the hours-per-point ratio from the sprint you entered. With no past sprint entered there is no ratio and no suggestion.

How to use it

Run this at the start of sprint planning, before anyone talks about which stories go in. Getting the number first stops the conversation running the other way, where the team picks a comfortable-looking backlog and then works out whether it fits.

Build the roster honestly

Add every person who will work on sprint items. Hours a day is the time they can put against those items on a normal day, not the length of their working day. For a full-time engineer with no other duties, six is a fair starting figure on an eight-hour day. Someone who spends half their week on another team gets three. A tech lead who is in a lot of other meetings might get four.

Days off covers holiday, training, conferences and any full day on a support rotation. Half days are allowed, so a person on a two-day course and one afternoon of interviews goes in as 2.5.

Set the overheads once

Ceremony hours are the same for everyone, so they live in the settings rather than on each row. Count planning, review, retro and every standup across the sprint. A two-week sprint with a two-hour planning, an hour of review, an hour of retro and ten fifteen-minute standups comes to 6.5 hours per person, which is more than most teams guess.

The focus factor absorbs everything else: interruptions, context switching, the code review you did for another team, the incident on Wednesday afternoon, and the shallow half hour after a meeting where nothing much happens. A factor between 60 and 80 percent is what most teams see once they measure it. Setting it to 100 does not give you more capacity, it just moves the disappointment to the end of the sprint.

Turn hours into points, if you use them

Points and hours are different currencies, and the exchange rate is local to your team. Enter the points the team finished last sprint and the focus-adjusted hours that produced them, and the tool divides one by the other. Applying that rate to the adjusted hours for this sprint gives a points figure grounded in what the team has actually done.

If the roster has changed a lot since that sprint, the rate is still roughly right, because it is a rate per hour rather than per person. If the kind of work has changed a lot, be more careful, and check the number against your velocity history before committing to it.

Read the result as a ceiling

Capacity is the most that could be delivered, so committing to all of it means committing to a sprint where nothing goes wrong. Commit somewhere below the number and keep a small pile of ready work to pull in when the sprint goes well. A team that finishes early and pulls more in looks and feels very different from a team that carries three items over every sprint, even when the delivered totals match.

A worked example

A team of five, a two-week sprint, ten working days. Ana, Bruno and Chidi are full-time engineers at six hours a day. Dana splits her time with another team and gets three. Eli is full-time at six but is away for a week.

Per person

Ceremonies are set to four hours per person. Ana has ten days present, so 10 times 6 is 60 hours, minus 4 for ceremonies, giving 56. Chidi is the same at 56. Bruno takes two days off, so 8 times 6 is 48, minus 4, giving 44. Dana is off for one day, so 9 times 3 is 27, minus 4, giving 23. Eli is away five days, so 5 times 6 is 30, minus 4, giving 26.

The raw team total is 56 plus 56 plus 44 plus 23 plus 26, which is 205 hours. That number looks like a lot of capacity, and it is the number that gets teams into trouble.

Applying the focus factor

At 70 percent, the adjusted figure is 143.5 hours. The 61.5 hours that came off are not waste. They are the interruptions and the shallow time that exist whether or not the plan admits to them. Setting the factor to 100 would have promised 205 hours of story work from a team that has never delivered that in a sprint.

Dana is the constraint at 23 hours, less than half the team average of 41. If two of the candidate stories need her specific knowledge, those 23 hours are the real limit on that part of the backlog, whatever the team total says.

Converting to points

Last sprint the team finished 32 points on 160 focus-adjusted hours, which is 5 hours per point. This sprint has 143.5 adjusted hours, so 143.5 divided by 5 gives 28.7 points. The team would sensibly commit to 26 or 27 and keep a couple of small ready items on the side. Committing to 29 would mean betting on a perfect sprint.

Frequently asked questions

What focus factor should we use?

Start at 70 percent and correct it with your own history. After a sprint, compare what the team actually got through against the raw hours the roster said were available, and use that ratio next time. Most teams land between 60 and 80. Below 60 usually means a lot of unplanned support work, which is worth making visible as its own line rather than hiding in the factor. Above 80 is rare, and if you are there, check whether ceremonies and support work are being counted somewhere else. The factor is not pessimism. It is the honest gap between hours on a calendar and hours of sprint work.

Should we count time for code review, testing and support?

It depends on whether that work is part of your definition of done. Review and testing for the sprint items belong inside the story estimates, so leave them in the capacity and let the estimates carry them. Support for an older release, production incidents and helping another team are different, because that work competes with the sprint. Either take it out as a fixed block of hours per person, the way ceremonies are handled, or lower the focus factor to reflect it. Doing both double-counts it.

Do we have to convert hours to points?

No. The points conversion is optional and the hours figure stands on its own. Some teams plan directly in hours, and for a team with steady work and a stable roster that works well. Points earn their keep when estimates are relative and comparative rather than absolute, because people are better at saying this is about twice that than at saying this is eleven hours. If you use points, the conversion here just gives you a sanity check that the two views agree.

The number came out lower than what we usually commit to. Now what?

That is the tool doing its job. Two things are usually going on. The team has been committing to a number that assumed nobody would be away and nothing would interrupt them, and it has been carrying items over quietly to cover the gap. Or the ceremony hours and days off in this sprint really are unusual, in which case the lower number is correct for this sprint only. Either way, commit to the lower number once and see what happens. A sprint that finishes everything and pulls in an extra item is a better place to start a retro than a sprint with three items in progress at the end.

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