Spare Capacity in your in-flight Sprint..

Step into the Scenario

Scrum Team

You have a ‘young’ team that is just into it’s second sprint. You are doing two-week sprints, and team just finished first week of current sprint. Three of the team members come up to you, the Scrum Master, and tell you that they have spare capacity. They completed their part of the work on some of the stories and now wondering what to do. 

You obviously don’t want them to be seating idle. What should be your approach? 

Explore 5

In this scenario, it is tempting to just tell them to ‘Pull’ a new story from Product Backlog. But, hold your horses here! 

I would recommend that you (as a team) explore these 5 different avenues.

What to do when you have spare capacity in your in-flight Sprint?

Let’s walk through each avenue one by one. 

Swarm

First preference should be on ‘Swarming’. Ask them to help other team member(s) in closing story. Remember, we get points for closing stories, and not for opening more. As I like to say..
Stop Starting, and Start Finishing Share on X

Pairing

You could go and pair with another team member. May be pick up new skills, may be learn new approach, may be provide another set of eyes to your colleague as s/he works on driving a story to completion.

If you are short sighted, you will look at pairing as a waste of time (as two people are working on one thing). However, if you are long, you will realize that it is an investment into the team.

Pairing helps in knowledgesharing, spreading the ‘wealth’, and gelling the team as one unit. In some shape, it also improves the quality of the outcome. 

Pay off your Debt!

Got any technical debt, that has been identified earlier and put aside with a reason that ‘we don’t have time’? This would be good avenue to spend that spare capacity on. Work on paying off that debt! 

AIR it out! 

How about looking into some..

• Automation
• Improvement
• Refactoring

Even a small amount of automation would help the team in the long run. 

Pull

I would suggest pulling a new story from your Product Backlog should be the last avenue that you explore. And, if you go this route, make sure to ask and confirm with your product owner. You want to pull the next highest priority story. 

Above all, pulling new story should be an exception, not a norm.

Indicators.. 

We talked about these five avenues to explore. Now, let’s look at the root cause as to why we have this spare capacity in the first place. 

In essence, getting this spare capacity in the middle of in-flight sprint is an indicator on one of these factors at play. 

• Team is being conservative when committing the stories to sprint [at sprint planning event.] So, you need to facilitate that conversation at the new sprint planning. 
• Team over estimating the points assigned to the story. Being overcauseous and erring on higher side, the team is assigning more points to the story than it actually needs. 

Remember, this is a new, young team. I would not blame the team for any of these, as this is just part of the learning process. They will eventually figure this out, you are there just help and speed up that process.