Release planning with future sprints and forecast created by the team

[Ole Tranberg]

Hi,

I am looking for a simple solution in Jira Software for release planning for agile teams.

What I would like is this:

 - Create a release which often will be for one quarter of a year and consisting of 6-7  two-weeks sprints. Because of Easter holidays, Christmas holidays etc there can exist sprints which are 3- og 4-week sprints.

 - I would like to create the sprints before the planning. The sprints should have start and end dates.

 - At a planning meeting we will add issues to each sprints. We will add as many issues to every sprint as the team expect to be able to solve. So instead of using Jiras estimated velocity based on historical sprints I would like to let the team member create their own forecast.

- I would like to have a visual burn-down (or burn-up) showing the release progress (it could be on daily basis or just updated after every sprint.

Do you guys have some ideas for a simple solution here?

BR,

  Ole

[Kyle_Kirkeide]

@Ole Tranberg Any update on if you found a good way to do this?  Looking to solve the same issue.  Goal is to allow Product Owner/Team plan out a whole release on a bit of a higher level once the issues are estimated and ready.

[Ole Tranberg]

No, I did not find a solution with Jira.

I had to make the capacity planning and the forecast outside Jira.

BR,

  Ole

[Kyle_Kirkeide]

What tool did you use outside of Jira

[Ole Tranberg]

I am using excel for the capacity-planning.

I have created a simple and easy to overview excel-sheet which includes all known public holidays, 1-day company-events etc. So basically the excel-sheet shows an overview of all the days that can be used for the plan (and the forecast) and all the days that the team members are doing something else (where "something else" can be anything from weekends, to public holidays, to company events).

Then the team members adds information about their planned vacations, courses, conferenceses etc. I.e. all know days where they know they can not work on the planned items.

And since we are estimating in "working days" and not Story Points then the forecast calculation for the expected velocity is straight forward. I would just wish I had the complete overview in Jira.

BR,
   Ole

[Jack Brickey]

@Ole Tranberg, welcome to the Community. Given what you have written I'm not sure I understand where the issue lies. You can easily create each sprint in the backlog ahead of time if you like though it is not necessary. There are version reports that can be used that should achieve your goal on "release progress". You could also consider using an Epic for the release and use the Epic burndown. I would recommend you review the online documentation provided by Atlassian and searching for sprint and release planning articles for more info.  Atlassian Documentation

[Ole Tranberg]

Thanks for the reply @Jack Brickey.

I have looked through some of the documentation but maybe I should take a look once again.

What I would like is to be able to create a release plan where the expected burn down is created by me (or actually by the team members) in stead of a calculation of previous sprints. In the planning phase/workshop we will add issues to the sprints in the release and the burn down should then reflect the plan we have created for the future sprints.

As far as I can see then the Versions Report creates a burn down and calculate extend done date by looking at historical sprints. Maybe I have missed a setting somewhere?

I will take one more look into version reports and try to find some more articles for release planning with Atlassian.

[Jack Brickey]

I see. I know that OOTB Jira does not provide a means of manually setting your own planned Burndown. Ther may be an addon for this but I don’t have any knowledge of such. One thing you could consider is to do something outside of Jira, e.g. using Excel but that will be pretty tedious I expect.