Planning Board

Planning Board

Once the project is underway, the combined business and technical team work together to develop the sprint plan for the iterations, breaking up the features into discrete tasks and assigning the tasks to the individual team members. During development as the team work to complete the various tasks and stories, the system will track changes in the actual effort to determine if the plan needs to be rebalanced to ensure on-time, on-budget delivery.

Product Backlog Planning

The list of user stories, requirements, defects and features is called the Product Backlog. SpiraPlan lets you organize the backlog by component, package or priority. You can order and categorize them by simple drag and drop editing. This is called backlog grooming.

Release Planning

The release planning view lets you manage the backlog of the different releases in parallel. You can visually see which features are going to be delivered in each release, with the ability to make adjustments by simply dragging and dropping items between the releases.

Sprint / Iteration Planning

The requirements, user stories, tasks, test cases and outstanding bugs and issues can be scheduled against the different iterations / sprints in the release. The system will calculate the available effort as items are added.

The epic view lets you see the user stories associated with each of the epics in the current release or sprint:

Scrum Task Boards

SpiraPlan includes Scrum Task Boards that let you see the individual tasks assigned to each of the Sprints and Iterations as well as by-person:

The user story view lets you see the tasks associated with each of the user stories in the current release or sprint:

This view lets you quickly see all of the current user stories being worked, and the progress of completing the related tasks, in a single unified view.

Kanban Boards

SpiraPlan provides a Kanban view of the project, where you can see all of the requirements planned for each release organized according to their position in the lifecycle. This view lets you see the flow of the requirements and identify then rectify any bottlenecks:

This allows you to manage the number of backlog items at each stage of the process and also load-balance the members of the project team.

SpiraPlan includes the ability to set Work In Progress (WIP) limits for each status so that you can limit the throughput of work in each release and sprint.

Resource Allocation

SpiraPlan lets you drill down into each release, iteration or sprint and view the items assigned to each person in the project. This allows the story cards to be easily assigned and re-assigned as necessary to load-balance the team’s workload.

The system provides colored progress bars that visually represent the completion of each story card as well as alerting the project manager to items that have started late or are projected to finish late.

Issue Tracking Boards

SpiraPlan includes the ability to display the list of bugs and defects in the system in a similar Agile Kanban board, so that you can easily plan and track the support and maintenance activities on the project.

Program Capability Boards

SpiraPlan lets you define the backlog of program-wide capabilities and display them in a convenient board view:

The program capabilities are mapped to the various program-level milestones, letting you plan when the capability needs to be delivered. This lets you do top-down planning of key initiatives that will be delivered across multiple individual products.

Program Requirement Boards

SpiraPlan also includes a program board lets you view all of the user stories, features and requirements for all of the projects in a single program-wide view. You can then prioritize the requirements by importance across all projects as well view the progress across the entire program:

In addition, SpiraPlan includes project portfolio views, where you can see the user stories, and other requirements for each of the projects in the program: