In this article, we will help you understand how to plan your sprint in Backlog Refinement.

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Overview

Navigation

Sprint Planning

Sprint Planning Listing

Sprint Planning Summary

Video Reference

Overview

The third section of Backlog Refinement is divided into two panes: Ready for Sprint Allocation and Planning for Sprint. As you drag-n-drop workitems to the Sprint panel, its capacity pyramid and the workitem distribution pie chart gets updated. The average velocity statistics are also available for reference so that you can load the sprint accordingly. Once you have planned workitems for the Sprint, you can launch the Execution Board so that card owners choose their cards, plan necessary ToDos, and move cards as they work on it.

Note: The Sprint Planning section of Backlog Refinement will have the same fields as available in the respective workitem listing.

Navigation

Navigate to the breadcrumb at the top and hover over the Project name, expand the Agile Planning module, and select Backlog Refinement. Click the Sprint Planning tab on the screen.

Sprint Planning

The workitems which are moved from the Groomed Backlog screen are available in the Ready for Sprint for Allocation section. These workitems are ready for development and need to be tagged to the sprints. You can add a new workitem by clicking the ADD button and selecting the workitem type.

The sprint planning consists of 2 panes:

  1. Sprint Planning Listing
  2. Sprint Planning Summary

Sprint Planning Listing

The Sprint Planning Listing is further divided into 2 sections:

A) Planning for Sprint

The drop-down enlists all the current and future sprints based on the current date. Users can tag/untag workitems to the listed sprints. By default, the immediate future sprint will be selected for sprint planning. The order of the sprints in the drop-down will be in descending order – from future most sprint to recent most sprint. The workitem added from the Backlog Refinement and having a Sprint name in it is added to the Planning for Sprint section.

B) Ready for Sprint Allocation

All the workitems moved from the Groomed Backlog are available here. Perform the following steps to tag or untag workitems to a sprint:

  1. Select the sprint that needs to be planned from the Planning for Sprint drop-down.
  2. Select the checkboxes of the workitems in the Ready for Sprint Allocation section. You can also search the workitem by its name or ID using the Search icon.
  3. Each column in the Ready for Sprint Allocation and Planning for Sprint listing also has a filter that you can use to further refine the workitem list based on the column values.
  4. The Total Count and Total Estimate Points are also shown in the bottom bar for the selected workitems.
  5. Drag-and-Drop the workitems from the Ready for Sprint Allocation section to the Planning for Sprint section to tag them with the selected sprint and vice-versa to untag them.
  6. To remove the workitems from Sprint Planning, select the workitem checkboxes in the Ready for Sprint Allocation section and click the Remove from Sprint Planning button. The workitems will move to Groomed Backlog, to know more click here.
  7. To update or modify the cards, simply double-click on the card you want to edit and make the necessary changes according to your needs.

Sprint Planning Summary

Sprint Planning Summary shows the analytics and summarization for the selected sprint in the Planning for Sprint drop-down.

The following data is shown:

  1. Capacity Pyramid

A colored pyramid for the Sprint indicates, to what extent the sprint is planned with respect to the capacity.

It also shows the Remaining Capacity for the sprint where the capacity is referred from the Capacity field on the Sprint instance.

As the sprint is loaded the pyramid starts filling in green color. If the user overloads a sprint, the pyramid is fully green and is highlighted in red color.

2. Sprint Velocity

It is calculated based on the past 12 sprints. It shows the following summaries:

  • Best 3: Shows the average value of the sum of estimated points of 3 sprints that have the highest sum of points amongst the 12 sprints.
  • Worst 3: Shows the average value of the sum of estimated points of 3 sprints that have the lowest sum of estimated points amongst the 12 sprints.
  • Last 3: Shows the average value of the sum of estimated points or workitem count of the last three sprints.

Also, the values of the 3 sprints are plotted relatively by three dots and are plotted based on the Sprint Date. When you hover over a sparkline, it shows the ID, name, and total story points of the related sprint.

Based on these values, the user can load the selected sprint accordingly.

3. Workitem Pie Chart

The chart is similar to that in the Groomed Backlog. It shows the workitem type distribution in the selected sprint. It helps to know the percentage of work being taken up across multiple item types.

Hovering over a slice in the chart will show the name of the workitem type like User Story and count of its instances and some of the estimated points of the instances.

Labels in each slice show the number of estimated points of the instances.

Once the sprint planning is completed, the user can click Go to Execution Board. The user receives a prompt of a confirmation alert. This alert seeks your confirmation to add the cards to the Execution Board and then navigate to the Execution Board or simply navigate to the  Execution Board having the cards tagged to ongoing sprint.

Video Reference

To dive deeper into the topic, we recommend watching the reference video available here.

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