Requirements and plans

Planning in Yavaren

Plan your work in Yavaren itself: spaces, epics to subtasks, a board, sprints, releases, and handing a story to Yavaren.

Planning is Yavaren's own place to plan work, for teams that do not want a separate tracker. It is a module: an admin of your organisation switches it on, and only when your plan includes it. While it is off, nothing of it is shown.

Today Planning is used through the Yavaren API (/v1/planning/..., listed under API); the console's Planning screens are not available yet.

Switching it on

An admin switches Planning on with PUT /v1/modules/planning (GET /v1/modules shows each module, whether it is on and whether your plan includes it). Yavaren asks the admin to confirm: a sign-in from the last few minutes, or the phrase change modules in the header X-Yavaren-Confirm. Switching it off hides it again; nothing is deleted. If your plan does not include Planning, Yavaren says so and nothing changes: ask your Yavaren account manager.

Spaces

A space holds one team's work. An admin creates it with:

• a short key, such as PAY. Items are numbered from it: PAY-1, PAY-2. The key never changes;
• a kind: scrum (with sprints) or kanban (a continuous flow);
• optionally, the Yavaren project its stories are handed to.

A scrum space starts with the states To do, In progress, In review and Done. A kanban space starts with Backlog, Ready, In progress and Done. An admin can change the states, limit which state may follow which, set a work-in-progress limit per state, and add fields of your own (text, number, date, or a choice from a list).

Items

Items go from the largest to the smallest: epic, feature, story, task, subtask. Bugs, incidents, improvements and technical debt sit under a feature or an epic, or on their own. Yavaren refuses a parent that does not fit, for example an epic under a story.

Each item has a title, a description in Markdown, up to 50 acceptance criteria, a state, a priority, an assignee, estimates, a due date, tags and your own fields.

When two people change the same item at the same time, the second save is refused with "reload it and try again". Nothing is overwritten.

Change the state, assignee, sprint, release or tags of up to 200 items at once. Either every item changes, or none does.

Comments, mentions and files

Comment on any item. Write @ followed by a colleague's e-mail address, for example @[email protected], and they are told. Only people of your organisation are told.

Attach files to an item: PDF, Word (.docx), Markdown, plain text, PNG or JPEG. Yavaren decides the type from the file's content, not its name. A file is always downloaded, never opened in the browser.

Sprints, releases and views

• Backlog: the ranked list, grouped by sprint. Move an item before or after another to change its place.
• Board: one column per state. A column over its work-in-progress limit is marked.
• Sprints: one sprint is active at a time per space. When you complete it, unfinished items go back to the backlog or to the next sprint.
• Releases: put items in a release, then mark it released. Marking a release released deploys nothing; deploying stays your own pipeline.
• Roadmap: epics and features with the dates their sprints, releases and due dates give them. An item with none of these has no dates.
• Dependencies: which items depend on or block others.
• Dashboard: counts by state and level, and the active sprint's burn-down. The burn-down is rebuilt from what really happened to the items, day by day; Yavaren never estimates it.

Save the filters you use often. Your saved filters are yours alone.

Handing a story to Yavaren

When a space is linked to a Yavaren project, hand a story, task or bug to Yavaren (POST /v1/planning/items/<key>/hand-over). Yavaren starts one job for it in that project and tags the item agent-ready. Handing it over again while the job runs does not start a second one. The result is a draft pull request, as for any story.

Who can do what