Before a sprint starts one of the important things that must be ready is the top priority task for that sprint. Ducalis helps you and your team make sure that before a sprint starts your team has agreed on what tasks to work on in a particular sprint.
In a prioritization board to access sprint planning settings heard to Evaluation Progress and Sprint planning.
Sprint planning in Ducalis involves three steps:
- Start
- Reveal
- Final
Start
This is the evaluation period. During this time, the team is estimating issues in the backlog for prioritization. An admin or owner of a board can set the length of the evaluation period.
Choose how long you want your sprint plannings to be – by when you would want a fresh prioritization report.
And you have the ability to choose the day of the week that you like to have your planning meetings.
The two evaluation mode:
You can find the option to switch on Evaluation poker mode under the Start block.
When the Evaluation poker mode is switched on, everyone’s scores are kept private until Reveal, but Facilitators can.
Reveal
This is when the team stops estimating the issues. If scores were hidden during evaluation, they are revealed for the team to discuss. Discussions are held for issues with low alignment (issues where the team has greatly differing scores). Find information about team alignment under the alignment page. To quickly find the issues with low team alignment, you can sort your issues by alignment ( e.g., low → high alignment).
The date and time of the reveal is also set by the board admin or board owner. But note that the Reveal cannot be set to be more than three days before the Final. You configure Slack, or email notifications so that your team can get reminders to complete evaluation before the Reveal.
A board admin or owner can block everyone in the board from editing their scores once Reveal begins. This will help prevent users from changing their scores after seeing other users’ scores.
After discussing the issues with low alignment, instead of the entire team going to re-evaluate those issues, you can choose facilitators for your team who will just change the final scores.
Facilitators will be able to see scores of other users during the evaluation period when the Evaluation poker mode is on. They won’t be able to edit their scores after Reveal starts, but will be able to put and change the final scores.
Final
This is the final step of the sprint planning process. Final scores are set and nothing can be edited. The prioritization results will be ready.
For further sorting and filtering, you can sync scores to your task tracker.
Under final, you will have a list of score backups that you can restore in case the scores expired when you still need them for a sprint.
You also have the ability to set score expiration dates – when you want the current scores to be reset for your team to reevaluate the backlog again. This will help to ensure that your top priority tasks match your current goal.
You can read more about Score expirations.