Something which takes care of:<p>- Teams availability, holidays etc.<p>- Shows free time available per team member (after applying the cost for each task assigned)
Prior to the planning the scrum master informs us about the 3-month-average of story points per sprint. We don't do any normalization on the raw story point value like reducing for vacations etc, we rely on the average.<p>We plan sprints by at first discussing team availability, which includes time required for trainings, off-time for vacations etc.<p>Next we discuss the backlog items considering who will probably work on which items.<p>After that we estimate how many story points we will probably manage, both by gut feeling as well as based on the probable task distribution.<p>This works quite well for us, we usually complete the sprint goals and only seldomly have to add new tasks into a ongoing sprint. If we don't manage to complete the sprint goals it is mostly caused by unexpected events or technical difficulties.<p>We are in the SaaS business.