Automated planner

Plan sprints aligned to priorities, team capacity and velocity with the click of a button.

To take full advantage of the automated sprint planner, make sure to enable and leverage workstreams within your workspace.

When workstreams are enabled, you'll be able to automatically allocate a % of work within sprints to each workstream.

For example, if you have workstreams for each issue type (i.e. new features, bugs, improvements and infrastructure), you could specify that 50% of a sprint be spent on new features, 20% on bugs, etc.

Work allocation

The first step in planning a sprint is setting your team's desired work allocation. Work allocation for a sprint can be split across any of the workstreams that are active within your workspace.

You can also specify a % of work to be pulled from the backlog as a whole.

In the example below, we've configured our desired sprint to be 50% new features, 20% bugs, 20% improvements and 10% infrastructure.

The points available for a sprint are based on the team capacity that was set in sprint settings.

If workstreams are not enabled, the sprint planner will only show the backlog as a source from which work can be pulled.

The sprint planner will pull issues into sprints based on their priority within workstreams and the backlog.

Allocating unassigned issues

In the sprint planner, you can specify whether any unassigned issues should be allocated to specific team members during sprint planning. This can be specified for each specific workstream and the backlog.

If multiple users are selected for a specific workstream or the backlog, assignments will be based on each person's available capacity within that sprint.

Only issues that are unassigned at the time of planning can be allocated using this method. Existing assignments cannot be overwritten.

If no users are selected, any unassigned issues that are allocated to a sprint will appear in the unassigned issues bucket. You can then manually drag issues from the unassigned bucket to specific team members.

Assignments will not take effect (or be synced back to Jira) on issues until the sprint is started, which happens either at the scheduled time or when the Start Sprint button is pressed.

Optimizing sprints for workstream allocation or team capacity

Before allocating work, you can choose whether to optimize the sprint for your desired workstream allocation or team capacity.

• Optimizing the sprint for workstream allocation: If this option is selected, the sprint planner will try to stay as true to your desired workstream allocation as possible, even if this means team capacity is not maximized.

• Optimizing the sprint for team capacity: If this option is selected, the sprint planner will try to maximize available capacity (allocate as close to 100% of capacity as possible for each user), even if it means variances in workstream allocation compared to your inputs.

Allocating work

Once desired work allocation has been specified, you can generate a sprint candidate by pressing Allocate work.

Issues will be allocated to each user, and you'll see a summary of sprint allocation and breakdown by workstream and issue type.

Allocating work does not start the sprint, nor does it assign any unassigned issues. The sprint will start either at the scheduled time or when the Start Sprint button is pressed. Once a sprint is started, any unassigned issues that are allocated to users will also be re-assigned to them.

Once a sprint candidate has been generated, it can be re-generated by going back to the Automated planner tab.

You can also manually adjust a sprint candidate by adding and removing issues.