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Planning

Sprint Capacity

An estimate of how much delivery work a team can realistically take on in a sprint after accounting for availability, meetings, support load, and other overhead.

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What capacity is really measuring

Sprint capacity is not just the number of people multiplied by the number of days in the sprint. It is a more realistic estimate of actual working room after subtracting time off, ceremonies, interruptions, and non-delivery obligations.

Capacity is useful because it makes commitment conversations more grounded. It helps teams avoid quietly planning against an ideal week that nobody actually has.

Why teams confuse it with velocity

Capacity is about available room before work starts. Velocity is about what the team has historically completed. They inform each other, but they are not the same measure.

Related terms

Keep exploring

Sprint Planning

Ceremonies

The session where a team decides what it will try to deliver in the sprint and how that work fits the sprint goal and available capacity.

Open definition

Velocity

Planning

A historical measure of how much work a team has completed across previous sprints, usually expressed in story points or a similar unit.

Open definition

Sprint Capacity Definition | StoryPointLab