Iteration Planner unlocks the power of the project management software as an Agile planning tool for software development. With it, you can combine sprints and milestones to graphically group cases into the scope of work that you’ll complete in each sprint. You can also balance the allocation of resources by dragging and dropping cases from one assignee to another. Iteration Planner is a lightweight way to plan work and manage teams using FogBugz.
Here are a few key suggestions to help you apply priorities in your projects:
- 1–3 Minimum Viable Product
- These are all of the cases that must be completed in order for your sprint to provide new value to the customer in the form of a usable feature.
- Priorities 4: Hygiene
- This is non-essential work that improves the product but is not required in order for the product or feature to be useful to a customer. Small amounts of this work are often spread throughout sprints to continue making small improvements to the product.
- Priority 5: Incidental work
- Don’t allow your scope to creep from a manageable size to something so huge that it couldn’t be completed in less than a decade by Steve Jobs and a host of efficiency experts. If you add something as incidental work that needs to be done during a sprint you need to subtract or deprioritize some other work that has an equivalent number of estimated hours. Keeping all your incidental cases under one priority allows you to group cases by priority and see how much time you are spending on cases that are not part of your MVP. At the end of your sprint add up the hours and determine whether or not the interrupts were a worthwhile use of your time. This discussion can be part of your retrospectives or done separately. Either way, the numbers should be useful for evaluating whether or not the work that was done during the sprint was part of the planned work.
- Priority 6: Long-range work
- Frequently teams are asked to take on a category of work that is not part of the MVP but does contribute to the overall plans of the organization. These tasks may be expected to take many sprints to complete and their progress needs to be tracked across multiple milestones.
- Priority 7: Stuff we won’t do
- It’s useful to declare this as a way of focusing the team and managing expectations about the work that will be completed in the sprint.
For Agile software development teams, Iteration Planner is a useful, graphical tool that allows you to visually manipulate the information you need for planning Sprints. With it, you can set the direction for your team’s work and monitor progress so you can deliver on your organization’s goals.
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