Set up Planning Board

When you've set up your planning folders, you have four views available to work with them:

• LIST: The list view.
• PLAN: The planning board view.
• TASK: The task board view.
• KANBAN: The kanban board view.

The planning board view complements the list view. While the latter offers you capabilities to accomplish various actions such as create, edit, and delete artifacts, planning folders and teams, the former offers product owners (or similar users) the ability to view, rank and move artifacts across the three planning folders (swimlanes) in a physical board-like user interface. In the Planning Board, planning folders are represented as swimlanes. In each swimlane, the tracker artifacts for the selected planning folders are represented as cards. You can also have a team's view of artifacts (backlogs and tasks), which is a swimlane representation of artifact cards for the selected team in the selected planning folder.

TeamForge user roles and permissions that are in place for planning folders apply to all the four views.

Use the Planning Board

You start populating the Planning Board by selecting a planning folder for each swin lane.

The drop-down list for each swim lane displays the hierarchy of active planning folders for the all the sprints and scrum teams that are under the project's root planning folder. By default, inactive planning folders are not shown in the swim lane drop-down list. You can organize the Planning Board the way you want by populating the swim lanes with planning folders of interest to you: for example, you may select the planning folder corresponding to the product backlog in the leftmost swim lane and various teams working on the release in the other two swim lanes, or a different sprint in each swim lange. Your selections are remembered for the current session.

In the Planning Board, artifact cards are displayed in ranked sequence within each swim lane. The tasks that you can accomplish while you work with the Planning Board include:

• Adding artifacts (quick add) in select planning folders with minimum required artifact information.

• Editing artifacts.

• Moving artifact cards within a swim lane and ranking them in select planning folders.

• Reassigning (move) artifacts from one planning folder to the other.

1. Click TRACKERS from the Project Home menu.

2. In the List Trackers, Planning Folders and Teams page, click PLAN. A Planning Board for the current project context is displayed.

3. For each swim lane in the Planning Board, select a planning folder from the drop-down list. The tracker artifacts contained by the planning folders are displayed as story cards within the corresponding swim lanes.

   • If a selected planning folder has subfolders, the artifacts within the subfolders are not displayed.

   • Cards have a color-coded bar to visually identify the priority. In addition, the open and closed card's background is color-coded to uniquely identify the status.

   • For each card, the artifact ID, title, priority, status, assigned to and points (story points) are displayed. For an artifact, the estimated effort (in hours) in shown only if its points=0. Relevant tooltips appear when you hover your mouse over these data elements.

   Assistive information such as the number of cards in the selected planning folder and planning folder points capacity are displayed at the top of the swim lane.

   note

   The Planning folder points capacity is not displayed for Iteration folder types.

   For example, in the following screenshot, the planning folder points capacity is shown as 36/100 Pts. Which means, you planned for 100 points, whereas the current points capacity (the sum of all open and closed artifacts) is 36 points. In other words, you have room for taking up more work in that particular planning folder.

   

   You can also see 2 cards at the top of the swim lane, which is the count of the number of cards in the selected planning folder (by default, only open cards are counted).

   Click the Show/hide closed artifacts ( ) toggle button to see the count of both open and closed artifacts.

   note

   You must have set the Points Capacity while creating planning folders to be able to see the current points capacity against the planned points capacity. For more information, see Create a Planning Folder.

4. Click the swin lane refresh ( ) button to refresh individual swim lanes.

5. To know more about an artifact, click the artifact ID link. The View Artifact page is displayed.

6. By default, closed artifacts are not shown in swim lanes. Click the Show/hide ( ) toggle button to show or hide closed artifacts in swim lanes.

7. To expand an artifact that has child artifacts, click the "+" symbol in the artifact card. The first, second and third-level child artifacts are displayed. When you expand an artifact, the parent and child artifacts are visually outline by means of colored boxes as shown in the following screenshot.

   

View Artifacts That Are Not Assigned to Any Planning Folder

• A new planning folder, None, is now available to select from the Select a Planning Folder drop-down list of the Planning Board swim lanes.
• Selecting None from the drop-down list populates the swim lane with all the artifacts that are not assigned to a planning folder yet (in other words, artifacts with None as Planning Folder).
• This is to let you view the list of all artifacts that do not have a planning folder assigned yet.
• You cannot rank or reorder the artifacts in the None swim lane like you do with artifacts from a normal planning folder.
• Moving an artifact into the None swim lane strips the artifact of its rank and order.