Now that you've familiarized yourself with the ZenHub board, customized pipelines, and created and organized issues, it's time to take a look at sprints!
Course Outline | |
| Creating your first sprint schedule in ZenHub | ✅ |
| Sprint automation options | ✅ |
| Adding issues to your sprint | ✅ |
| The difference between epics and sprints | ✅ |
In Agile-Scrum, sprints are a fixed length of time (typically two weeks) during which an agreed-upon chunk of work is completed and ready to be shipped. ZenHub sprints allow teams to group issues together that will be completed within this timeframe. With sprints, teams can automate their sprint planning process and automatically carry over unfinished work into upcoming sprints.
Creating your first sprint schedule
To create your sprint schedule in ZenHub, select the green + icon located in the top right corner of your Workspace and select Set up sprints for your team
From here, you can set your sprint schedule by selecting the start date and end date for your first sprint from the calendar view. ZenHub will automatically create 3 sprints. New sprints will be created continuously as each sprint ends:
Changing Sprint Schedules
If you want to change your Sprint schedule, bring up the Sprints setup panel and click the button above the calendar:
Turning Sprints off
If you want to turn Sprints off, bring up the Sprints setup panel and click the "Turn off sprints" button in the lower left corner:
Sprint automation options
1. Move unfinished issues to the next sprint
By toggling this option on, when a sprint completes (passes its end date), all issues assigned to the sprint that have not yet been closed will automatically move to the next sprint. As issues can live in multiple sprints when incomplete Issues move from your past sprint to the new current sprint, the issues will continue to exist in the sprint they are being moved from (i.e these issues will belong to two sprints)
2. Automatically build new sprints from the backlog
By toggling this option on, ZenHub will automatically build your sprints. Choose the number of story points you'd like added to your next sprint and the pipeline you'd like issues added from. ZenHub will automatically add issues from the top of this pipeline to your sprint. Issues that are not already estimated, will be counted with the value of 2 Story Points when being added into the sprint from your backlog pipeline. Learn more
Adding issues to your ZenHub sprint
Now that you've set up your automatic sprint schedule, it's time to add issues to your sprint. To add issues, head to your ZenHub board. From here, you will able to use multi-action or a combination of filtering and multi-action to add the desired issues to your sprint. This is a great way to eliminate the onerous process of performing certain actions over and over again.
For example, your team may dedicate a sprint to tackling bugs. The team can filter the Board by the bug label, select all issues, and choose the option Set sprint.
The difference between epics and sprints
As epics and sprints are both used to organize work and boost your productivity, you may be wondering about how these interact and the main differences between them:
| Sprints | Epics |
| Sprints allow you to group together issues that will be completed within a fixed timeframe ( typically two weeks) | Epics allow you to group related issues together and are the best way to plan and track both short-term and long-term goals. |
| Sprints are used to track the progress of issues and pull requests. They contain issues related by time | Epics contain issues related in subject |
| The scope of work is fixed once a sprint begins. | The scope is flexible. Issues can be added or removed as teams discover more about the bigger goal. |
Epics are intended to give you a broad understanding of larger initiatives. When paired with sprints, you’re able to work towards these bigger goals in manageable iterations. This means you deliver more business value (e.g. workable code) more frequently. Pairing sprints with epics gives you a granular way to plan and achieve your product backlog. It clarifies both the big picture and the minute details that make it up, providing everything necessary to ship better projects faster.
You're all set! With sprints and epics you can increase productivity by organizing and structuring your work!