How do I add sprints for Plan Only Teams?

[Ray Nixon]

I'm using Advanced Roadmaps / Plans, to create a yearly plan for multiple teams. Part of this planning involves creating / rearranging teams.

Since the teams are not yet active teams, and I don't want them to show up in the Teams dropdown on tickets (and cause confusion), I used Plan Only Teams (which look like they are designed for this exact reason).

I've set up the plan to pull in Initiatives, Epics and Stories for particular Jira projects, using a filter as the plan issue source (every story is in an epic, every epic in an Initiative (no feature level used).

The question is, how do I create Sprints for the Plan Only Teams? It seems like I would have to associate each team with a board, but how do I create a board for these teams when they don't exist in Jira (i.e. I can't create a board with a filter of tickets allocated to those teams, but the tickets are really allocated to those teams). 

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @Ray Nixon ,

Sprints belong to a board, not a team. Your reasoning is entirely right that you can't create a filter in Jira from information that is not there. But usually the setup is done the other way around ...

A board in Jira is a collection of work that a team uses to find its daily work. Even if you don't use Advanced Roadmaps, you would still find a way to fetch the work for this team and make sure they can collaborate on their common backlog. For project/product teams, very often that backlog comes from one/more project(s) they manage themselves. It is quite common that your board filter would be something like  Project in (A, B, C) or something similar. For platform/service teams, who are pulled into project work by other teams because they have a specific expertise, it does happen that issues get assigned to them via the (new) team field or some other custom field. To allow for that, the field needs to be publicly available in Jira of course.

In both scenarios, you will then be able to use the team board as an issue source for your plan, making your life a lot easier.

Hope this helps!

[Ray Nixon]

Hi Walter, 

Thanks for the reply. It doesn't really help in our case, because our projects are not nicely split between our Teams (and that's too big a tasks to change at the moment). Our existing boards use a filter of Team = xxx.  Actually part of using Advanced Roadmaps is to find the best split of teams for the work we've got on, so rearranging the Jira projects before running these scenarios doesn't really work. 

So, I think in this case I'll need to do the planning without using sprints.

I think it would a useful expansion of Plan Only Teams (which do look like they are designed for this sort of scenario planning) to also be able to have Plan Only Sprints. That way we can run these planning scenarios, and when we've got a final approach, we can then convert the teams, and create the boards with the sprints.