How much capacity would you consider to refactor, fix important bugs, explore new technologies or ideas?

When a sprint is planned, the team commits the sprint item according to the available capacity. Ideally, the team should use 80% to 90% of the team’s total capacity for optimal execution. Beyond that, it will affect the performance of your team. Bugs, refactorings, and investigations require consistent attention to avoid increasing technical debt.

The team already has work from the product owner, but some teams have reserved 25% of their capacity for this work. There are also good habits that teams should follow. 15105 Scrum Team Capacity Allocation. This means 15% of the team’s technical debt capacity, 10% of the team’s bug capacity, and 5% of the team’s exploration work capacity. If the team can follow these assignments, it can meet both the code quality and maintenance requirements of most software applications.

It’s a good idea to track sprints by sprints, but if for some reason your team can’t do this on a particular sprint due to high priority delivery, that’s okay.