February 21st, 2023 by Adam Sandman
strategy requirements management
We are excited to announce that, following on from the redesign of the main planning board in Spira, we have listened to your feedback around requirements' status. In our new version 7.5 release of Spira coming out shortly, we have changed how the requirements statuses work to give you greater flexibility and control on whether a status appears in the board, and crucially, the order they are displayed in.
How Does It Work Now?
On the current versions of the planning board, when you use the product backlog view, the system will include any of the pre-planned statuses that are linked into the active workflows. That meant typically you would see:
- Requested
- Under Review
- Rejected
- Accepted
For the release backlog and sprint backlog views, you would see the following planned statuses:
- Planned
- In Progress
- Developed
- Tested
- Completed
- Obsolete
If you had added any other requirement statuses into the workflow, they would appear after Obsolete in order, even if logically they should appear before some of the other statuses.
Also when using the new, beta planning board, it meant that you would not have been able to move items from the product backlog to the release backlog when viewing status, since the cards would not be displayed in the statuses being viewed.
So with the upcoming version 7.5 release of Spira, we have changed how requirements' statuses work on the boards:
How Will it Work in Version 7.5?
With the new version of Spira, we have a new administration screen where product owners/admins can specify which requirement statuses will appear on the boards, and what order they should be displayed in:
By default, the system will show all active statuses being used in a workflow, in the same order as before.
Note this page is only available if you have Enabled Beta Features and in which case it will be displayed in the Administration menu:
However if you configure the statues to have a specific order and to only have specific ones in your boards, Spira will switch to only using those statuses and in the order you specify.
For example, if we enable only the following statuses, and specify our desired position:
When you go to view the Planning Board for this product, you will see:
Only the selected statuses are included in the board, and it will display them in the order that you selected.
Furthermore, we use the same statuses in all three different views (product backlog, release backlog, sprint backlog) which makes the user experience more consistent.