Build out your plan

Creating a plan requires you to do two things: estimate and schedule work items.

Estimate work items

An estimate is an educated guess at how long you expect a work item will take to complete. You can base your estimations on either story points or time-based units (hours/days) — whichever aligns with how your teams work.

These estimates don’t need to be super accurate, but enough for planning purposes. It helps with scheduling work items and allows you to use features like capacity planning later on.

Schedule work items

Once you have an idea of how big or small each task will be, the next step is to schedule them on your timeline. You can do this using dates which works exactly as you’d expect: you set a start and end date in the Date column, and it’s placed it on your timeline. Alternatively, you can place the schedule bar directly on your timeline.

Scrum teams can also schedule work according to sprints or releases. your plan uses the dates of the sprint or release to create a corresponding schedule bar on your timeline. You can then save the sprint or release assignments to your work items in Jira to make planning for your team that much easier. Planning work items this way is less prescriptive, but it better aligns with the agile planning philosophy.

Learn more about agile planning in the Atlassian Agile Coach

Dependencies

You can also define order in which your work items need to be done using dependencies. With these, you can indicate that a work item is reliant on another being completed first or that it needs to be completed before another one can begin.

When referencing dependencies, your plan labels incoming dependencies with is blocked by, and outgoing dependencies with blocks.

Further reading:

Learn more about estimating and scheduling work items

Learn more about dependencies