The Sprint Planner
🔹 Overview
The Sprint Planner is a powerful capacity-driven sprint planning tool for Jira Cloud that helps teams plan sprints based on real availability, not assumptions. Unlike traditional planning methods that rely solely on story points or Excel exports, The Sprint Planner considers working days, public holidays, time spent in scrum events, trainings, and even ad-hoc activities like interviews or client calls. It intelligently factors in carry-forward tickets from previous sprints, separates development and QA efforts, and calculates actual available hours for each team member. The result? Smarter sprint commitments, fewer surprises, and a detailed sprint goal report that gives stakeholders full visibility into where team time is going. Whether you're a product company, a service agency, or a scaling startup, The Sprint Planner brings sanity and precision to your agile planning.
🔹 Table of Contents
🔹 Key Features
Plan sprints using real team availability, not guesswork.
Account for leaves, public holidays, meetings, and trainings
Split Dev and QA efforts per ticket
Auto-fetch efforts from Jira custom fields
Sync total effort to Jira’s Story Points or Original Estimate to power native Jira reports
Handle carry-forward work without losing estimates
Define and export sprint goals with linked tickets
All inside Jira, without spreadsheets.
🔹Why Choose The Sprint Planner?
Unlike traditional tools that rely on velocity averages or Excel exports, The Sprint Planner helps you plan sprints based on your team’s actual availability. It captures Dev and QA efforts separately, factors in time lost to meetings, leaves, and training, and syncs effort data directly with Jira, powering native reports like velocity and burndown. Built on Forge, it's fast, secure, and deeply integrated with your Jira workflows. Simply put: real inputs, real visibility, real velocity.
🔹 Prerequisites
Before you can configure The Sprint Planner, ensure you have the following Jira permissions for the project:
Browse Projects
Manage Sprints
Edit Issues
Schedule Issues
If any of these permissions are missing, you will see an access-denied prompt (see example below).
These permissions are typically sufficient for most users to configure and use the app effectively.
However, in some organizations, additional permissions may be required, depending on:
Custom workflow conditions or validations
Active automation rules
Project-specific permission schemes
🔹 Accessing the App
Once the app is installed, follow the path shown in the video below to access the app.
The sprint planning is divided into 6 primary sections in the app:
🔹 Settings
The Settings screen allows project administrators to define how sprint planning will be conducted, either using efforts in hours or story points. Depending on the selected mode, users can configure the default team, standard working days, and daily working hours to establish baseline capacity. When using story points, additional fields appear to set the maximum story point allocation per team member and define a conversion rate between story points and hours (e.g., 1 SP = 8 hours), ensuring consistency between abstract estimation and time-based planning. These configurations serve as foundational inputs for accurate sprint planning and team workload distribution.
🔹 Sprint Detail
The Sprint Details screen sets the foundation for accurate sprint planning. Here, users define the sprint duration, shift hours per day, and public holidays. It also includes a Standard Deduction section where users can subtract hours spent on recurring non-development activities like scrum events, town halls, training, and team rituals (e.g., Fun Fridays). These deductions can be configured per team member, per developer, per tester, per sprint, per week, or per day, providing granular control over how actual available hours are calculated for each sprint.
🔹 Team Detail
The Team Details section allows users to select a preconfigured team and define team-specific availability parameters that directly influence sprint capacity. This section acts as the foundation for accurate planning, ensuring each team member's time is realistically accounted for during the sprint.
🔹 Carry Forward or Spillover
The Carry Forward screen captures all incomplete or pending tasks from the current sprint, specifically those where development or testing has not been fully finished, and allows teams to seamlessly transition these items into the next sprint. Each ticket entry displays its status, assigned developer and tester, as well as the estimated remaining efforts for both roles. Users can update or assign team members and log the remaining effort per role. This section plays a vital role in ensuring that no unfinished work is lost during sprint transitions, providing clear visibility and actionable continuity for upcoming sprint planning.
🔹 New Items
The New Items screen enables the product team to strategically allocate new tasks to the current sprint based on the remaining capacity of developers and testers. This section captures detailed assignments, including ticket references, responsible developers and testers, and their respective estimated efforts in story points. Teams can either pull in existing tickets or define new ad hoc tasks, making the planning process both structured and flexible. With real-time visibility into available bandwidth, this screen ensures that new work is planned responsibly, maximizing team efficiency without risking burnout.
🔹 Sprint Goal & Summary
The Sprint Summary screen provides a consolidated view of each team member’s capacity, clearly indicating whether a resource is underutilized or overbooked. The Sprint Goal screen gives the user the option to craft team-specific, role-specific, and client-specific goals, with an option to add key sprint-related notes like code freeze date or deployment date.
Handling Projects with Multiple Boards
When a Jira project contains two or more boards, users will be prompted to select a board via a pop-up immediately upon launching The Sprint Planner app. This selection ensures that all subsequent planning data is accurately scoped to the chosen board.
Users can switch to a different board at any time by navigating through the designated board selection option available in the app interface.
Note: Default settings and configured teams are shared across all boards within a project.
🔹 Links
💡Feedback, Suggestions, or Queries, Click Here.
▶️ Detailed videos on ‘The Sprint Planner’ App, Click Here.
🌐Learn more about PgM Innovation, Click Here.
📥Install the app, Click Here.