The Release Planner allows you to manage your backlog and sprints and edit individual tasks.
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The Release Planner practices Scrum methodology and includes concepts such as sprint, epic, story and subtask. It enforces a hierarchy of plan items with epics being backlog items that contain stories spanning across multiple sprints, stories being the unit of work that can be scheduled on a sprint, and tasks being the smaller items that can appear only under a story.
In the Release Planner, tasks are grouped by sprints at the highest level. By default, stories are listed directly under each sprint, and the subtasks of each story are in the next level.
Alternatively, you can group your tasks by activity, assignee or epic under each sprint. To do this, click on the Group By menu on the toolbar and select the attribute by which you would like to group the tasks. Select “None” to return to default.
In any of the group by view, you can drag and drop tasks to different groups and the attribute on the task will be updated correspondingly.
You can quickly expand the tree viewer to a certain level using the Expand to Level menu on the toolbar.
You can search for tasks by task ID or task summary using the search box on the toolbar.
You can hide completed tasks by clicking on the Hide Completed button on the toolbar.
You can hide sprints previous to the active one by clicking on the Hide Previous Sprints button on the toolbar. If any of the sprints contains incomplete tasks, the sprint would still be visible.
You can filter the tasks by activity (component) using the Activity Filter. Click on the Activity Filter button and you will see a dropdown menu containing all of the activities in the plan, and you can select the activities you would like to see.
Tasks in the Release Planner follow the same highlighting rules as in the Task List, e.g. coloured blue if scheduled for today, crossed-out if completed. They also have the same icon decorations as in the Task List with the exceptions that all outgoing icons are overlaying on top of the task icon.
In addition, you can highlight the tasks that belong to one or more users. Click on the Assignee Highlight button and you will see a dropdown menu containing all assignees and you may select whose tasks you would like to be highlighted.
If the parent of a task is not present in the plan, the task is grouped under a sprint named “Unplanned”. You can fix this situation by moving the task to a story in the current plan.
To create a new task, right click on the parent of the new task and select New [task type]. Alternatively, you can create a new story by clicking on the New Story button on the toolbar.
In the Release Planner, you can edit the summary, activity, assignee, estimate and time remaining values of tasks, if those fields are supported in your task repository.
You can also schedule individual tasks from the Release Planner using the Schedule for menu in the context menu.
To create a cross-repository association, simply drag a task from the Task List onto an item in the Release Planner. A new association will be created for you on that item. You can also create associations within the same repository or within the same plan by holding on the Ctrl or Cmd key while dragging and dropping.
For more information on associations, please see Task Associations in Release Planner
You can activate a task from the Release Planner by right-clicking on a single task and select Activate from the context menu.
You can set a sprint to be the active sprint, if supported, by right clicking on the sprint and select Set as Active Sprint.
There are two ways you can set the sprint for a story.
If the story is part of an epic, moving the story to a sprint will maintain its link to the epic. Use Group by Epic to see the parent epics of stories in sprints.
You can move task from one parent to another using drag and drop. The new parent-child relationship must continue to follow the Scrum hierarchy. If the hierarchy could not be maintained by your action, you will have to option to convert task type to continue with the drag and drop.
You can rank tasks and stories by re-ordering them using drag and drop.
To submit your changes, simply click on the Submit button on the toolbar and all of your changes will be submitted.
Release properties can be set in the Release Properties dialog. You can access the dialog by clicking on the button on the toolbar. Please see the “Settings and Preferences” section in the Tasktop Planner page for further instructions.