We are working to transition our development team to be more Agile. I have a question about story point estimation and their relationship to an individual's skill.
The scenario is that our team members do not have cross-functional skills. One might focus entirely on front-end, another only does back-end.
The problem we fail to plan accordingly to our team composition. We figure, if our average velocity is let's say 200 points per sprint, then that number should not be exceeded. However, tasks vary each sprint and sometimes there are too few back-end tasks or too few front-end tasks.
My question is – should we divide and plan back-end and front-end tasks separately, or is there a better way?
Best Answer
When planning in Scrum, the first thing to realize is that you should not try to plan the work to keep everybody busy, but rather you should try to plan a certain amount of functionality that your team will try to deliver at the end of the sprint.
In Scrum, the input to the planning is the product backlog, which should contain the desired features in the order that they provide the most value to the business. During the planning, you take items from the top of the product backlog until you have enough work to fill a sprint.
If the top of the product backlog happens to contain a lot a features that involve mostly front-end work, then it can happen that the sprint is "full" before you reach the 200 story-point mark. Full here means that the front-end developers are fully loaded.
Within the Scrum framework, there are a few possibilities to deal with this situation:
Examples of work that the back-end developers could pick up are:
In Scrum, the goal should not be that you as individual work at maximum capacity/productivity, but that the team produces that what benefits the business the most.