Normalize Capacity Across Swimlanes

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What you will achieve

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Prerequisites

• Planningboard is installed and a board is already configured on a Polarion Wiki page or LiveDoc.
• Swimlane assignment type is set to Users (Assignee). Capacity normalization works at the per-user level; it requires user-based swimlanes.
• Teams Service is set up with at least one team, team members, and a calendar. See Set Up Teams Service.
• At least one Polarion Plan with a start date and due date is visible on the board.

1

Verify Teams Service is providing capacity data

Capacity normalization depends on data from the Teams Service. Before configuring normalization, confirm that user capacity is flowing through correctly.Open the board and inspect the capacity bar in any swimlane. If the bar shows 0 / 0 for all users, the Teams Service is either not configured or not returning calendar data for the current plan range.Refer to Track User Capacity and Track Team Capacity to confirm the prerequisite setup is in place.

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2

Enable `useTeamsService` in the widget

In the Widget Parameters panel, locate Capacity and confirm the useTeamsService parameter is enabled. This parameter connects the board to the Teams Service, which supplies totalCapacity, allocatedCapacity, and availableCapacity per user per plan.

Capacity
  └─ Use Teams Service:  ✓  (enabled)

When useTeamsService is active, the plan’s flat capacity value is replaced by per-user capacity values derived from the team calendar and the percentage assignment for each user.In the same Widget Parameters panel, also confirm that the Swimlanes (Rows) section is set to use the team enumeration field. Set Assignment Type to Enumeration Field and enter the field ID (for example, team):

Finally, enable the Normalization option in the widget parameters. Under the Normalization section, set Use Normalization by Swimlane to Yes:

Users who have no team calendar entry for the plan’s date range will default to totalCapacity = 0.0. Their swimlane will show zero available capacity but will still appear on the board unless you also enable Plan Range filtering (see Step 4).

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3

Configure `capacityLoad` to track effort

In the Widget Parameters panel, set the Capacity Load mode. Planningboard derives effort from remainingEstimate / initialEstimate time-tracking fields by default. If your team uses a custom field for effort points, specify it here.

Capacity
  └─ Capacity Load:  remainingEstimate   (or your custom field ID)

The setEffort calculation produces three values per work item:

Value	Meaning
effort	Total estimate (initial or custom field value)
effortDone	For resolved items, equals effort; for open items, 0
effortTodo	Remaining work (remainingEstimate or custom field; 0 for resolved items)

Effort values are rounded to one decimal place. Ensure the field you reference holds numeric values in the same unit as your team calendar (hours or story points, whichever the Teams Service is configured to use).

Configuration parameters are whitespace-sensitive. Do not include spaces around the field ID value. remainingEstimate (trailing space) will not resolve to the correct field.

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4

Suppress out-of-range users with Plan Range filtering

When a plan covers a short iteration and some team members have assignments only outside that window, their swimlanes contribute noise. Enable Plan Range filtering to show only users with active capacity in the currently displayed plans.Go to Polarion Administration → Configuration Properties and add:

nextedy.planningboard.activeTeamAssignmentsInPlanRangeOnly=true

Once applied:

• Users with team assignments overlapping the displayed plan range are shown.
• Users with assignments entirely outside the plan range are hidden.
• Work items previously assigned to hidden users are moved to the Not Assigned / Other swimlane.

If the property appears not to apply after saving, make a trivial edit to any other Configuration Property (add and remove a space) and save again. This forces Polarion to flush and re-read the configuration.

An earlier property nextedy.planningboard.activeTeamAssignmentsOnly=true (introduced in version 25.3.0) hid only past assignments and was independent of the displayed plan scope. It was deprecated in version 25.12.0. Use activeTeamAssignmentsInPlanRangeOnly instead.

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5

Review the per-user capacity breakdown

After the configuration above is in place, each swimlane capacity bar reflects:

availableCapacity = totalCapacity − allocatedCapacity

Where:

• totalCapacity — hours derived from the team calendar for the plan’s start-to-due-date window, multiplied by the user’s percentage assignment.
• allocatedCapacity — sum of remainingEstimate (or custom field) for all work items assigned to the user within the plan.
• availableCapacity — the remaining headroom. A negative value indicates overallocation.

The board displays this as a progress bar inside each swimlane header. An overallocated swimlane will appear filled beyond 100%.

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Capacity flow at a glance

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Common pitfalls

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Verification

1. Each user swimlane displays a capacity bar with distinct values — not identical values across all swimlanes.
2. Users without team assignments in the current plan range are absent from the board (if activeTeamAssignmentsInPlanRangeOnly=true is set).
3. Overallocated swimlanes show a filled or overflowing capacity bar.
4. The Not Assigned / Other swimlane contains any work items that belonged to now-hidden users.

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See also

• Configure Capacity Tracking
• Track Team Capacity
• Track User Capacity
• Visualize Capacity Load
• Configure Multi-Dimensional Capacity
• Set Up Teams Service
• Filter Swimlanes by Plan Range
• Capacity Calculation Issues