Sprints › How to Plan for Sprints

How to Plan for Sprints

Teams use the Sprint Stories collapsible pane of the Backlog page to plan their upcoming sprints.

• Click the Show Sprints link (left-facing double arrow) to open the Sprint Stories panel.
• Click the right-facing double arrow link (Hide Sprints) to close the panel. You can filter Sprint Stories by release, sprint, and team.

Create a filter to specify the release and sprint that you want to plan. Your filter settings become the default view on subsequent visits to the page and persist until you change them. The available releases are those associated with the current product in the product backlog.

Sprint Stories is divided into the following sections:

• Stories display the user stories committed to for a sprint. Expand each user story to display the tasks necessary to complete them. By default, the sprint backlog lists user stories by their story points (highest to lowest).
• Velocity displays a team velocity bar chart. Capacity is the maximum number of story points the team can commit to for the sprint, and appears as a green bar. Capacity is taken from the Velocity value in the scrum team properties. The Planned bar represents the number of story points the team actually commits to delivering for the sprint. As user stories are added and removed from the sprint, this bar automatically updates. If planned story points exceed the team capacity, the Planned bar changes to red. The team can use the velocity chart to see if they are reaching their capacity.

  Note: The Velocity chart only displays when you filter the Sprint Backlog by team.

When planning the workload for an upcoming sprint, a scrum team generally does the following tasks:

• View sprint details
• Rank the product backlog
• Add user stories to the sprint
• Create user story tasks
• Define or refine user story acceptance criteria
• Create user story dependencies
• Assign team members to unassigned user stories