Scrum program planning board
Summarize
Summary of Scrum program planning board
The Scrum program planning board in Agile Board provides a centralized interface for ServiceNow customers to plan, schedule, and review work across multiple scrum teams within a scrum program. It enables efficient coordination of epics, stories, teams, and sprints, helping you manage workload distribution and dependencies effectively.
Show less
Key Features
- Program selector: Choose a scrum program to plan or review, with options to add teams or edit program details.
- Program timeline: Navigate through the program's timeline horizontally or via forward/back controls.
- Epic Backlog filter: Filter stories by selected epics to analyze workload distribution across sprints.
- Configuration panel: Toggle visibility of key components such as the team backlog lane and story dependencies.
- Story dependencies: Visually track dependencies between stories across teams and sprints using color-coded indicators to highlight scheduling order and potential conflicts.
- Epic Backlog pane: Review, edit, and manage epics and their unassigned or unscheduled stories, including creating new stories within epics.
- Scrum teams list: View and update team details, including members, capacity, and descriptions. Add sprints directly from the planning board.
- Team backlog lane: Manage stories assigned to teams but not yet scheduled into sprints, facilitating workload visibility and sprint assignment planning.
- Team sprint lanes: View sprint cadence with details like duration, story points, and capacity; schedule stories by dragging them into appropriate sprints.
- Story cards: Visual representation of stories that can be moved to assign teams and sprints. Supports double-click editing and displays related defect or enhancement records when the Agile Development — Unified Backlog plugin is activated.
- Sprint workload capacity bar: Displays planned workload versus team capacity per sprint, aiding in efficient sprint planning.
- Zoom and Search: Adjust board view with zoom controls and filter stories using search terms such as story number or keywords.
- Stories list view: Access a standard list view of all program stories for alternate management and review.
- Add sprints from planning board: Create new sprints for teams directly on the program planning board without navigating away.
Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers
This planning board empowers you to coordinate multiple scrum teams seamlessly, providing comprehensive visibility into epics, stories, and sprint schedules. It helps identify scheduling conflicts through dependency visualization, optimize workload distribution, and streamline sprint creation and management within a single interface. By centralizing program planning, you can improve cross-team collaboration, reduce planning overhead, and maintain alignment on program goals and delivery timelines.
Use a centralized view on Agile Board to plan work for the teams that are working on your scrum program.
Agile Board has a program planning board where you can plan, schedule, and review work for your scrum teams. The planning page contains the following components that guide you during your planning process.
- Program selector
Select a program that you want to plan or review. After you select a program, you can add teams or update other information by clicking the edit icon (
).
- Program timeline
Navigate the program timeline by scrolling horizontally or by using the forward (
) and back (
) icons.
- Epic Backlog filter
Select an epic backlog that is associated with your scrum program. You can filter the stories on the program planning board and the epic backlog pane. By analyzing the workload for just these selected epics, you can understand how the workload is scheduled across sprints.
- Configuration panel
- Turn on or off the following components on the planning board by using the configuration
panel icon (
).
- Team backlog
Enables you to show or hide the team's backlog lane.
- Story dependencies
Enables you to visually analyze dependencies between the stories of different sprints and teams by using the story dependency lines. You can use the dependencies option to show or hide these dependency lines. If you choose to hide the dependencies or if the dependencies involve a story that's not on the board, then you can see a colored border on the story card.
The color of the dependency indicates the way you've scheduled the stories.- Green: The prerequisite story is scheduled in a sprint first. Then, the dependent story is scheduled in a later sprint.
- Red: The dependent story is scheduled in a sprint first. Then, the prerequisite story is scheduled in a later sprint. Review the dependency and reschedule the story as required.
For information on how to add story dependencies, see Add dependencies for Agile Development 2.0 stories.
- Epic Backlog pane
Enables you to see a list of all the epics that are based on the filter criteria in the epic backlog definition. For more information, see Create an epic backlog.
In the backlog pane, you can do the following actions for an epic:- View the epic description.
- View the unassigned and unscheduled stories of the epic as cards with their short descriptions and story points.
- Edit the epic's information by clicking its name.
- Add a new story to the epic by clicking Create Story.
- Scrum teams
View all the teams that are involved in the selected scrum program toward the left of the planning board.
You can update a team's information, such as the team members, group capacity, or description, by clicking the team's name.
If your teams do not have sprints added to them, or if you want to add more sprints, you can Add sprints from the program planning board directly.
- Team backlog lane
Enables you to see the stories that are assigned to the team but these stories aren't scheduled yet into any sprint.
While planning your scrum program, if you know which stories must be assigned to the team but you don't know what sprints to use, you can move these stories to the team's backlog lane. By doing so, you can have a clear idea of the team's workload for the upcoming sprints and then eventually add these stories to the correct sprints.
You can also unplan a story that has already been scheduled to a sprint by dragging the story card back to the team's backlog. Use the backlog lane on the planning board to see which team has the story. Then, decide which sprint to schedule it in.
If you want to unassign a story from a team, you can drag the story card and drop it back into the epic backlog lane.
- Team sprint lanes
Enable you to see the sprint cadences of the teams.
Pointing your cursor to a sprint's name shows you its details such as the duration, total story points, and filled capacity. You can edit details, such as group capacity and planned start and end dates, by clicking the sprint name.
While planning your scrum program, if you know the sprint in which the story would be worked on, you can move the story card to that sprint.
- Story cards
Enable you to see the stories of the epics from your scrum program in the form of cards. You can move these cards around to assign them to teams and to plan them into sprints.
If you have activated the Agile Development — Unified Backlog plugin (com.snc.sdlc.agile.multi_task), you can also see stories that were added from the triage board to your unified backlog. From the planning board, you can double-click a story card to open it in a pop-up window and edit its details. If the story is created from a record on the triage board, such as a defect, you can see both the story information and the defect information side-by-side.
Note:Stories can be created from enhancements, defects, incidents, or other such records only if you have activated the Agile Development — Unified Backlog plugin (com.snc.sdlc.agile.multi_task).- Sprint workload capacity bar
Plan a sprint efficiently. The bar, which is under a sprint name, indicates the workload that is planned for the team versus the team's capacity for that sprint. Pointing your cursor to the sprint name gives you additional details.
- Zoom in and zoom out
- Adjust the board view using the zoom in icon (
) and the zoom out icon (
).
- Search
Filter the stories on the planning board using a search term. For example, you can enter a story number or a phrase from a short description.
- Stories list
- View a list of all stories of the program using the standard list view icon (
).