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Lesson 4: Agile plans

In this section, you will create a plan, edit the plan overview, and balance the workload across team members.
Teams that follow agile methods, such as Scrum, typically divide their release schedule into a series of fixed-length development iterations, with fixed end dates. Planning for these iterations involves scheduling the work to be done during an iteration and assigning elements of that work to members of the team. To be effective, plans need to be accessible to everyone on the team and they need to change dynamically over the course of the iteration to reflect the team's position and direction.
In Jazz™, the planning component provides tools to assist with the planning and execution of development iterations. The approach is simple: plans are composed of work items that match certain criteria. Treating plans as a set of work items has the following useful characteristics:
  • Plans are live:
    • Changing work items changes the plan. For example, closing a work item marks the work item as done on the plan, without need for further explicit actions.
    • Changing the plan directly changes the work items, or creates new work items if necessary.
  • Plans can be viewed in many ways. A plan can easily be regrouped by owner, functional category, duration, or any other criteria that is available on work items.
  • Plans are available to everyone on the team.
In this section you will learn:
  • How to create a plan
  • How to edit the plan overview
  • How to balance the workload across team members

Because this tutorial doesn't contain many work items, it's hard to show all the interesting aspects of the plans here. But we will cover enough of them to help you understand the basics of planning in Jazz.

Creating a new plan

In this task you'll learn how to create a new plan.
  1. In the Team Artifacts view, expand the current project area.
  2. Select the Plans item and right-click; then click New > Plan.
  3. In the New plan wizard, on the Create Plan page, complete the following steps:
    1. In the Name field, type a name, such as Prelude.
    2. Ensure that the Plan Type is set to Sprint Backlog.
    3. Ensure that the Team area is named Team 1, created by Jazz during the project area creation.
    4. Ensure that the Iteration field is set to Sprint 1 (1.0).
  4. Click Finish. The Plan editor opens on the new plan. You can also see the plan in the Team Artifacts view.
You have now created a new iteration plan that will include all the work items assigned to Team 1 that targets the milestone Sprint 1 (1.0). For now, none of the work items are assigned to that milestone and team yet. We'll perform that task in the following sections.

Editing the plan overview

The first step is to provide a textual overview of the goals of this plan with some important information that you want to share with your team and with others interested in your team's work.
  1. Start editing the plan: Click the Edit page Overview button on the Plan editor toolbar, or click the start editing link.
  2. Type the following text in the Overview page:
    Goals
    
    This plan covers the first iteration of the Prelude project.
    It lists all the work items that the current Prelude team is in charge of.
    
    Team Guidelines
    
    Please close your work items immediately after the relevant code is delivered.
    Please provide a test case for all application interfaces.
  3. Format the text with headings and lists
    1. Place your cursor on the first line of the text with the word "Goals"
    2. Press Ctrl+Space to open the Content Assist tools.
    3. Select Heading 1 (=) from the Content Assist menu to emphasize this title. Apply the same text style to the "Team Guidelines" line.
    4. Use the content assist to apply a bulleted list to the two lines under Team Guidelines.
    At the end of this step, your overview should look something like the following image:

    Styled content of an iteration plan

  4. Click Save.
  5. Click the Edit Overview Edit Overview button button in the toolbar to exit edit mode.

Editing the planned items

Assign work items to your team members:
  1. If the open work items are no longer visible in the Work Items view, re-run the Open Work Items query.
  2. In the Plan editor, click the Planned Items tab. Change the View As to Work Breakdown.
  3. Drag each work item to the appropriate owner on the plan. This assigns the work item to the Prelude Team and to milestone Sprint 1 (1.0).
  4. To complete your plan, set the priority and the work estimate for each work item:
    1. Click the Priority icon to set the work item priority.
    2. Click the Estimate icon to set the work item estimate.

    Assigning priority and estimates to work items

  5. Click Save. Now that you have finished your plan, you can resolve the work item that assigned this task to you.
  6. From the Plan editor, double-click the Define Sprint Backlog work item. This opens the work item in the Work Item editor.
  7. Set the work item to Complete.
  8. Click Save. If you switch back to the plan, you should see that the Define a Sprint Backlog work item has been removed.

Lesson checkpoint

In this lesson, you learned how to create a plan, edit the plan overview, and distribute the workload among team members.
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