Who defines the amount of work to be completed during an iteration?

In Disciplined Agile (DA), teams are self-organizing and empowered. During iteration planning, the Product Owner presents the prioritized backlog of work. However, it is the responsibility of the entire delivery team to determine how much of that work they can realistically commit to completing within the iteration. This decision is based on their collective understanding of their current capacity, historical performance (velocity), and the complexity of the prioritized items. The team "pulls" work from the backlog into the iteration plan, rather than having work "pushed" onto them. This fosters ownership, accountability, and a sustainable pace.

A. The product owner prioritizes the work ("what") but does not dictate the amount; the team determines its own capacity and commitment.

B. The quality tester is a member of the team, and their capacity is a factor, but they do not make this decision for the entire team.

C. The team lead acts as a servant leader and facilitator, not a manager who dictates the team's workload or commitments.

1. Ambler, S. W., & Lines, M. (2019). Choose Your WoW! A Disciplined Agile Delivery Handbook for Optimizing Your Way of Working. Project Management Institute.

Page 101, "Plan the Iteration" section: "The team decides how much work to bring into the iteration. They do this by considering their velocity... and the relative size of the work items at the top of the work item list."

Page 40, "Principle: Empowered Teams": "DA teams are self-organizing in that they determine their own way of working (WoW)... They own their process and they are accountable for their results."

2. Project Management Institute. (2017). Agile Practice Guide.

Section 5.2.4, "Iteration Planning": "The team determines its capacity for the iteration... The team pulls the number of stories from the top of the backlog that they forecast they can complete in the iteration." This principle is foundational to the DA toolkit.