Agile Planning
Plan and manage your projects, programs, and products with integrated Agile support
Agile planning with GitLab
Development teams continue to accelerate value delivery with iterative, incremental, and lean project methodologies, such as Scrum, Kanban, and Extreme Programming (XP). Large enterprises have adopted Agile at enterprise scale through a variety of frameworks, including Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Spotify, and Large Scale Scrum (LeSS). GitLab enables teams to apply Agile practices and principles to organize and manage their work, whatever their chosen methodology.
GitLab benefits
As the most comprehensive DevSecOps platform, GitLab is:
- Seamless: GitLab supports collaboration and visibility for Agile teams — from planning to deployment and beyond — with a single user experience and a common set of tools
- Integrated: Manage projects in the same system where you perform your work
- Scalable: Organize multiple Agile teams to achieve enterprise Agile scalability
- Flexible: Customize out-of-the-box functionality to the needs of your methodology, whether you're rolling your own flavor of Agile or adopting a formal framework
- Easy to learn: See our Quick Start guide and tutorials on setting up Agile teams
Manage Agile projects
GitLab enables lean and Agile project management from basic issue tracking to Scrum and Kanban-style project management. Whether you’re simply tracking a few issues or managing the complete DevSecOps lifecycle across a team of developers, GitLab has your team covered.
- Plan, assign, and track with issues
- Organize work with labels, iterations and milestones
- Visualize work with boards and roadmaps
- Correlate work with output using merge requests
Manage programs and portfolios
Maintain visibility and control the people and projects aligned with business initiatives. Define and enforce policy and permissions, track progress and velocity across multiple projects and groups, and prioritize initiatives to deliver the greatest amount of value.
- Organize new business initiatives and efforts into Epics
- Align teams and projects into programs—without sacrificing security and visibility—using Subgroups
- Plan Sub-Epics and issues into Iterations and Milestones
- Visualize value delivery using Roadmaps, Insights, and Value Stream Analytics
Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) with GitLab
See how your organization can use GitLab to build a framework using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). Dive into the details around building out your Agile framework for development teams built on three pillars: team, program, and portfolio.
Features
- Issues: Start with an issue that captures a single feature that delivers business value for users.
- Tasks: Often, a user story is decomposed into individual tasks. Create a task within an issue in GitLab, to further identify those individual units of work.
- Epics: Manage your portfolio of projects more efficiently and with less effort by tracking groups of issues that share a theme, across projects and milestones with epics.
- Iterations: Create a cadence to assign issues to your team's sprints with iterations.
- Issue boards: Everything is in one place. Track issues and communicate progress without switching between products. One interface to follow your issues from backlog to done.
- Roadmaps: Start date and/or due date can be visualized in a form of a timeline. The epics roadmap page shows such a visualization for all the epics which are under a group and/or its subgroups.
- Burndown Chart: Track work in real time, and mitigate risks as they arise. Burndown charts allow teams to visualize the work scoped in a current sprint as they are being completed.
- Collaboration: The ability to contribute conversationally is offered throughout GitLab in issues, epics, merge requests, commits, and more!
- Traceability: Align your team's issues with subsequent merge requests that give you complete traceability from issue creation to end once the related pipeline passes.
- Wikis: A system for documentation called Wiki, if you are wanting to keep your documentation in the same project where your code resides.
- Enterprise Agile Frameworks: Large enterprises have adopted Agile at enterprise scale using a variety of frameworks. GitLab can support SAFe, Spotify, Disciplined Agile Delivery and more.
An Agile iteration with GitLab
User stories → GitLab issues
In Agile, you often start with a user story that captures a single feature that delivers business value for users. In GitLab, a single issue within a project serves this purpose.
Task → GitLab task
Often, a user story is decomposed into individual tasks. You can create a task within an issue in GitLab, to further identify those individual units of work.
Epics → GitLab epics
Some Agile practitioners specify an abstraction above user stories, often called an epic, that indicates a larger user flow consisting of multiple features. In GitLab, an epic allows you to decompose work into multiple child sub-epics and issues to represent complex initiatives that span many groups and projects.
Product backlog → GitLab issue lists and prioritized labels
The product or business owners typically create these user stories to reflect the needs of the business and customers. In GitLab, there are dynamically generated lists which users can view to track their backlog. Labels give flexibility to filter and tailor your view to reflect what is important for your team.
Sprints → GitLab iterations
A sprint represents a finite timebox in which the work is to be completed, which may be a week, a few weeks, or perhaps a month or more. GitLab iteration cadences can be used to capture your team's sprint cadences. Automated iteration management reduces the admnisitrative burden.
Points and estimation → GitLab issue weights
In GitLab, issues have a weight attribute, which captures the estimated effort. Decompose an issue into tasks to perform more precise estimation. Time tracking allow teams to estimate and track time spent on issues.
Agile board → GitLab Issue Boards
Issue boards provide a central point for collaboration and to define your issue lifecycle. Issue boards help you to visualize and manage your entire process in GitLab. Use labels to create lists and filter data to create a view of your team's process.
Burndown charts → GitLab Burndown Charts
With GitLab burndown charts teams can visualize the work scoped in a sprint "burning down" as it's being completed. At a glance, you see the current state for the completion a given iteration or milestone.
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