What is a plan

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If you're using the improved planning interface, this page is for you. If you're using live plans, head to Live plans (legacy).

Before you begin

For Advanced Roadmaps to capture the latest data from Jira, you'll need to organize your work into what we call issue sources. The issue details that come from these issue sources will be used to create the ideal schedule for your teams. The issues can be scheduled across sprints, months, even years.

These are the issue sources into which you'll have to organize your work in Jira:

  • Boards: A board displays issues from one or more projects, giving you a flexible way of viewing, managing, and reporting on work in progress. There are two types of boards in you can use as issue sources:
    • Scrum board — for teams that plan their work in sprints
    • Kanban board — for teams that focus on managing and constraining their work-in-progress
  • Projects: A project is a collection of issues that is defined according to your organization's requirements. For example, it can be a software development project, a marketing campaign, or a website enhancement request system.
  • Filters: Your board's filter is a Jira issue filter (a JQL query) that specifies which issues are included on your board. For example, your board may include issues from multiple projects, or from only one project, or from a particular component of a project.

    Note that only the administrator of a board or a user with the Advanced Roadmaps administrator global permission can configure a board's filter.

Out of the three (3) issue sources, we recommend that you use Scrum boards. This gives you the ability to manage sprints from those boards, plan the capacity of future sprints, and assign issues to sprints — all directly from your plan.

What is a plan?

A plan is a roadmap of all the work that you manage in Jira. Work can be anything you're involved in — it can be the issues your teams are working on, the releases your teams have committed to delivering, and more.

Here's an example of a plan:

1

Navigate to different views of your plan:

  • Roadmap, to see the issues in your plan, including issue details, and how these issues are scheduled for your team to work on.
  • Teams, to configure and manage the teams that are working across all the issues in your plan.
  • Releases, to configure and manage the releases associated with all the issues in your plan.

See Working with plans to know more about these views in your plan.

2

Configure plan settings, like the name of your plan, or the issue sources your plan is using. You can also delete a plan from the settings icon.

3

Filter work in your plan, so you're viewing only the work you need to see. You can filter your work by projects, releases, teams, and other filters.

See Viewing work and Filtering issues for more details.

4

The different sections in the roadmap view of your plan, where you can view and work on issues accordingly:

  • Scope, which displays the issues in the plan according to hierarchy levels. Expand a hierarchy level to see the issues of that level — and for each issue, the issue count (for each row), issue type icon, issue key, and issue summary are displayed. You can also create an issue in this section.
  • Fields, which displays the fields added to a plan as columns. Each column contains the corresponding issue details, as well as the corresponding issue actions.
  • Timeline, which displays issues in schedule bars, and the size of each bar corresponds to its start and end dates. You can schedule these issues by dragging and dropping the bars themselves. You can also adjust the start and end dates by dragging the corresponding end of the bar accordingly.
See Working with plans for more details.

5

Perform actions for your plan:

  • X warnings shows you any misaligned dates in your plan. Learn more about warnings on the Viewing warnings page.
  • Auto-schedule your plan, to automatically schedule the issues in your plan, based on issue details from Jira, like assigned sprints, assigned releases, dependencies, dates, and more.
  • Share your roadmap, to share a read-only view of your roadmap to relevant stakeholders in your team. As an option, you can choose to embed the URL, so your consumers can embed your roadmap as needed. See Sharing and exporting plan data for more information.
  • Review changes in your plan, so you can select which changes you want to save in Jira, as well as which ones to discard from your plan.

As a best practice, make a habit of regularly reviewing and saving your changes in Jira. This way, you can inform stakeholders, keep the work items in Jira up to date, and ensure that your teams are ready to execute on your plan — all in real time.

6

Customize the view of the timeline, to make it easier for your audience to consume your plan. The following view settings are available:

  • Group by: Group your issues into separate swimlanes by assignee, project, or team.
  • Color by: Color your issues by status, team, or label, or by the corresponding values of any single-choice select and multiple-choice select custom fields being used in the plan.

See Customizing view settings for more information.

Check out this video to see how to navigate a plan in action.



Last modified on Aug 7, 2020

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