Introduction

Until now, in order to add a swimlane for an ART-level Feature to a Team Planning Board, at least one of the following two conditions must be met:

• The Team has at least one issue planned for the selected PI that is hierarchically linked to the ART-level Feature.

• The ART-level Feature is included in the ART Roadmap, with an overlap of at least one day with the selected PI.

However, from the perspective of customers or end users, there have been some challenges with this approach to planning:

• The ART roadmap is typically planned around three months in advance, meaning that Features included there may not always appear in the final prioritized list of Features before the PI Planning event.

• A Feature planned in the ART roadmap for a PI automatically appears on the Team Planning Boards of all Teams within that ART, resulting in a cluttered board with an excessive number of Feature swimlanes for most Teams.

• As a workaround to ensure that only the Teams contributing to a Feature have a swimlane for it on their board, Teams are required to create candidate stories upfront. However, this process is not straightforward and comes with a lot of potential pitfalls.

The new way of planning

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To address the challenges outlined above, we will introduce a new method for adding ART-level Features to Team Planning Boards for selected PIs.

As a result, certain behaviors in Agile Hive will be updated:

1. ‘Assigned PIs’ Custom Field: Initially intended for use only with Objective and Risk issues, this restriction will be removed. As a result, all types of issues (excluding Milestones) at both the ART and Team levels can be assigned to specific PIs by simply setting a single field value.

2. ‘Assigned Teams’ Custom Field: This new field will allow for the explicit assignment of any issue at both the ART and Team levels (excluding Milestones) to one or more specific Teams. As a result, by combining the 'Assigned PIs' and 'Assigned Teams' fields, only the Feature swimlanes for the relevant Teams in the assigned PIs will appear on the Team Planning Boards, helping to declutter the boards by removing irrelevant swimlanes.

3. Disconnect the ART Roadmap from the Team Planning Boards: With the changes to the two Custom Fields described above in place, the ART Roadmap is no longer needed to determine which Features are displayed as swimlanes on the boards of Teams within the ART. Going forward, the ART Roadmap will be treated as a separate entity, similar to how the roadmaps are handled at the Portfolio and Large Solution layers.

4. Add ART Features to a Team’s PI plan: On Team Planning Boards, each Team will be able to add ART-level Features to their PI plan by simply dragging and dropping them onto the board. In the background, Agile Hive will automatically update the ‘Assigned PIs’ and ‘Assigned Teams’ Custom Fields of those issues, ensuring a smooth and effortless workflow for the end user.

5. Calculation of ‘PI Involvement’ field: When determining the PIs in which Teams are actively working on a Feature, Agile Hive will only consider the Teams' actual state of planning, based on the planned Team-level issues. The ‘PI Involvement’ field will no longer reflect issues planned in the ART Roadmap.

This results in two conditions that determine whether or not an ART-level Feature is being displayed as swimlane in a Team’s planning board:

• no change The Team has at least one issue planned for the selected PI that is hierarchically linked to the ART-level Feature.

• new The ART-level Feature includes the fields 'Assigned Teams' and 'Assigned PIs', which are set to align with the respective parameters of the currently displayed Team Planning Board.

Transitioning from the old to the new way of planning

Once the new version of Agile Hive, which includes the 'Assigned Teams' Custom Field, is installed, a Jira Administrator must update the Screen used by ART-level projects in Agile Hive to incorporate this new field.

After this initial configuration change, all you need to do is ensure that the ART-level Features included in a PI of planned status in the ART Roadmap and that are not yet broken down into Team-level work items have the 'Assigned PIs' and 'Assigned Teams' fields correctly set.

Any Feature that already has child issues planned for a specific Iteration within any of the Teams in the ART will not be affected, as it will still appear on the Team’s board based on its current planning state. This also means that PIs already in a completed status won’t break, neither won’t any Report metrics of those PIs.

‘Improved planning’ preview in Team Planning Boards beta

To further ease the transition from the current planning system to the new method, you now have the option to manually switch to the enhanced planning mode (please note that this feature is still in beta phase). Simultaneously, we eliminated the ‘Hide empty parents' filter option from the Team Planning Board since the new 'Improved planning’ preview provides the same functionality.

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When the 'Improved Planning' mode is activated, it severs the link between the Team Planning Board and the ART-level Roadmap. Consequently, only those ART Feature swimlanes that are tagged with specific values for the 'Assigned Teams' and 'Assigned PIs' Custom Fields will be displayed on the Team Planning Board.

This preview allows users to familiarize themselves with the updated behavior of ART-level Features on the Team Planning Board, as outlined in bullet points 1 to 3 under The new way of planning on this page. Once the full functionality of the new planning mode is ready, we will upgrade the 'Improved planning' preview to become one of the core features of the Team Planning Board.