What is a planning folder? What are Planning and Task Boards?

A planning folder is a virtual container that helps you organize and plan the work that goes into delivering a product.

You can create a hierarchy of planning folders to organize artifacts by product, release, iteration, etc. You can store artifacts from multiple trackers in a planning folder. This allows you to plan various stages of your project (i.e. releases, iterations, etc.).

Selecting an individual planning folder provides a view of all artifacts from all trackers within the selected planning folder.

The Planned For field identifies which product, release, or iteration the artifact is planned for, based on the planning folder that it is assigned to.

For example, in an agile development environment, a project manager breaks down the prospective product into its component parts and looks at what it would take to deliver each one. When all the parts planned for a given iteration are finished, the product is considered complete for that iteration.

Some parts of a product can be developed more or less in isolation, but most depend on other parts. Tracking these relationships is one of the trickiest aspects of product development.

For example, you can only provide a graphical user interface for a shopping cart application if you also come up with a database for the customer's payment data to be stored and accessed. That in turn requires a data storage and backup solution of some kind. And so on.

Use a planning folder to track the dependencies among the parts of your project as each moves toward completion. As you work through the question of what depends on what, you'll move artifacts representing user stories into the appropriate iteration in the appropriate release. As you proceed, you'll find a pattern like this emerging:

• Product 1
  • Release 1
    • Iteration 1
    • Iteration 2
  • Release 2
• Product 2

Your planning folder lets you see at a glance the pieces of the work that support other pieces, and the pieces that depend on other pieces. Think of this as a "planning tree." If you are responsible for a development project, you can use this tree view to understand and predict the time and effort required to deliver a given set of features.

What are Planning and Task Boards?

• Planning Board: The Planning Board is an important tool for your TeamForge project's Agile planning activities. It enables you to plan and monitor the features that are required in each sprint (or iteration), and assign them from the product backlog to specific sprints.
• Task Board: The Task Board is an important tool in the Agile process. It helps the team to focus on the work at hand in the current sprint and feed progress data back into the system.

When you've set up your planning folders, you have three views available to work with them:

• List: The list view.
• Plan: The planning board view.
• Track: The task board view.

The planning board view complements the list view. While the latter offers you capabilities to accomplish various actions such as create, edit, and delete artifacts and planning folders, the former offers product owners (or similar users) the ability to view, rank and move artifacts across the three planning folders (swimlanes) in a physical board-like user interface. In the Planning Board, planning folders are represented as swimlanes. In each swimlane, the tracker artifacts for the selected planning folders are represented as cards.

Unlike the list view and planning board view, which can be used for agile project planning, the task board view is for tracking tasks in a sprint. TeamForge project administrators can configure the Task Board. Once that's done, projects members can use the Task Board to break down the stories into tasks and then progress the tasks, and the story, towards completion.

The Task Board can have at least two and up to seven swimlanes depending on how your project administrator configures it. Every swimlane in the Task Board represents a task status. Once configured, team members can use the Task Board to view tasks in a selected planning folder, add new tasks for a backlog item (epic, story, etc) and move tasks from one swimlane to the other as tasks progress from one status to the other.

Both Planning and Task Boards present a team's view of artifacts (backlogs and tasks), which is a swimlane representation of artifact cards for the selected team in the selected planning folder.

TeamForge user roles and permissions that are in place for planning folders apply to all the three views.

You can click the LIST, PLAN and TRACK buttons to toggle between the three views.