Sprint Planning | Elixion Docs

Planning a sprint in Elixion, the platform for Engineering Intelligence™, is three moves: create the sprint, fill it against a capacity, and start it. Completing it later is a fourth, and the only one that asks you to decide what happens to work that did not land.

Create a sprint

From the sprints index, click New sprint. The dialog is titled Create a sprint and asks for:

| Field | Notes | |-------|-------| | Name | Required | | Goal | Optional. The main objective of the sprint | | Start date | Required | | Duration | A number plus Days or Weeks. The derived end date is shown as Ends Jun 14 | | Capacity (story points) | Optional |

The dialog fills itself in from the project where it can:

Name is the next number after the highest sprint number in the project.
Start date is the day after the latest sprint that was not cancelled ended.
Duration comes from the project's sprint length.
Capacity is the project's measured average velocity, rounded. With no velocity yet it falls back to the project's default sprint capacity, scaled to the duration you chose.

Anything you type yourself is kept. Create sprint stays disabled until there is a name, a start date and a project.

The sprint is created in Draft. Its name, goal, duration and capacities stay editable on its Overview tab while it is Draft or Planned.

Fill the sprint

Open Plan the next sprint at /sprints/planning, or click Open planner on the sprints index. The planner features one sprint, labelled Running now if it is the active sprint and Up next otherwise.

Capacity, velocity and team hours

The featured sprint's card carries a Capacity meter reading planned against capacity with a percentage, for example 94 / 86 pts · 109%. It turns amber above 90 percent and red above 100 percent.

Under it, two lines of context:

Velocity: last sprint's figure and the average of the completed sprints, with a recommended commitment derived from the average. With no completed sprints it reads the manual baseline instead, marked as an estimate, or offers a link to set one in Project Settings.
Team capacity: the arithmetic spelled out, 4 members × 10 working days × 8h/day = 320h. Working days come from the project's settings. The hours per day is a stated assumption, which is why the formula is shown rather than just the total.

The unplanned list

Underneath sits every issue in the project that is not in a sprint, whatever its status, headed Unplanned with the true total. It has its own search box, which reaches beyond the loaded page, and a Load more control that shows how many of the total you are looking at.

To move work into a sprint:

drag a row onto the featured sprint's card, or
tick the rows you want and use the Add N to S-12 button for the sprint you want. There is one button per upcoming sprint, so a selection can go into any of them.

A row can carry a warning triangle. Its tooltip lists the readiness checks that issue fails, from the four the project can enable: has title, has description, has acceptance criteria, has story point estimate. It is a flag only, and never blocks adding the issue.

Dragging a row onto another row reorders the unplanned list.

Start the sprint

Open the sprint and click Start sprint, available while it is Draft or Planned. Starting it freezes the commitment, moves Backlog issues to To Do, stamps the start to now and shifts the end date to preserve the duration. See Sprints Overview for what is recorded.

A sprint cannot start with no issues, or with every issue already Done or Deferred, and only one sprint runs in a project at a time.

Change scope mid-sprint

Nothing prevents adding or removing work once a sprint is running. Use Add issue on the sprint's Overview tab, the remove control on an issue row, the Sprint field on the issue page, or the planner.

Each change reports what it did to the plan, for example PAY-42 added to Sprint 17. Planned now 94 points, up from 86 committed. If the addition pushes a sprint with a capacity past it, a second message says the sprint is now over capacity.

Complete the sprint

Click Complete sprint on the sprint, or Complete sprint in the actions menu of an active sprint's card on the index.

The dialog is titled Complete Sprint with the sprint's name. Its opening line is one of:

Checking for incomplete issues…
All issues in this sprint are done. Complete this sprint?
This sprint has 11 incomplete issues. Choose how to handle them before completing the sprint.

An incomplete issue is any issue in the sprint that is not Done.

Choose what happens to unfinished work

Pick one Default Action for Incomplete Issues:

| Option | What it does | |--------|--------------| | Move to Backlog | Takes the issue out of the sprint and sets its status to Backlog. This is the default | | Move to Another Sprint | Repoints the issue at the sprint you pick. Its status is left alone | | Keep in Sprint | Leaves the issue where it is, in the completed sprint, with its status unchanged |

Move to Another Sprint reveals a Select target sprint picker. If the project has no other open sprint the option is disabled and says to create a sprint first.

Every incomplete issue is listed, with its own dropdown so you can override the default for that one issue and pick its own target sprint. Above the list, the dialog shows the number of incomplete issues and their points total, a tally of the decisions such as 8 to backlog, 3 to sprint, and a line reading how many points will move out of this sprint.

The two warnings

More work than the destination can hold appears when a destination sprint has a capacity and the incoming points would push it past it. Each destination gets its own sentence naming its capacity, what is already planned, what would arrive and what that comes to. Destinations with no capacity set raise nothing, because there is no limit to compare against.

This sprint has already ended appears when a target sprint's end date is in the past, and reads These sprints have already ended when more than one of them has. Those sprints remain selectable, sorted last and labelled with the date they ended, because moving work into a finished sprint is sometimes deliberate.

Target sprints offered are the project's Draft, Planned and Active sprints, excluding the one you are completing. Each option reads as its name, its status, and where relevant a note that it is next up, the date it ended, and its capacity.

What completing does

The dialog states it before you commit:

The completed issues stay in this sprint as its delivered work. They are not moved or reopened.
The sprint becomes Completed and stays visible in the archive. It can be reopened later, which makes it the active sprint again, and only while no other sprint in the project is running.
Moving issues cannot be undone automatically. Reopening the sprint restores its status, but the issues you moved stay where they went.

Completion Notes is an optional box, up to 2000 characters. What you write is appended to the sprint's retrospective notes, stamped with your name and the time. Review notes are untouched.

Complete Sprint stays disabled while the incomplete list is still loading or failed to load, and while any issue set to move to a sprint has no target chosen.

What completion writes

The sprint becomes Completed, with the time it closed.
Its completed story points are recomputed from the issues that are Done, and its actual hours from the time logged.
Its velocity is recorded, provided it planned more than zero points.
Each disposition is written into the issue's history as a carry-over entry, naming the sprint it left and the sprint it joined, or the backlog.
Any sprint that received work has its totals recomputed in the same operation.

Reopen a completed sprint

Reopening a sprint restores its Active status and clears its completion. It deliberately changes nothing else: Done issues are not reopened, points are not recomputed, and issues that were moved out are not pulled back. It is refused while another sprint in the project is running, rather than quietly demoting the sprint that is live.

Next: Capacity Planning, which covers the capacity figures behind these numbers.