YouTrack Standalone 2017.1 Help

Use an Agile Board for a New Project

This document covers basics of the Agile mode in YouTrack, and the Board in particular, and is intended to help you get acquainted and start working with it. Here, we describe the following minimum scenario - you start using agile for a new project, with default fields, and configured assignees.

In this document, we focus on the case when you get a new project, and start working from the scratch. If you are going to use the agile Board with existing project, please refer to the Use an Agile Board for an Existing Project page.

Before users can start creating swimlanes and tasks, plan sprints, estimate their work and monitor the progress, the project and the board should configured by the project admin.

Getting Started for Administrators

  1. Create a new project and set up assignees and access to the project.
  2. Create and attach to your project a field that will be used as estimation for your tasks. It should be a field of integer type.
  3. Click Agile Board button to switch to the board.
  4. When you open the board for a project for the very first time, you get notification that the project will be configured automatically to work with the board. To start the initial configuration, click the provided link. During the configuration a new saved search is created for the project: your project's Backlog.
  5. When the initial auto-configuration is completed, you are navigated to the board with opened Settings section. Check carefully the default settings and change them in accordance with your needs:
    • Select columns to be displayed on the board. Columns correspond to issue's States. By default, the following states are displayed Open, In progress, Fixed and Verified. You can change the number of board columns by selecting the checkboxes for the states. Here, in board Settings, you can also set up column's color, so you would be able to monitor your sprint (work) progress visually, using the progress bar, rename columns, and even create your own new columns.
    • Check and configure, if needed, the board fields. We would recommend to keep the default settings here — they are sufficient to start using the board:
      • Select a saved search to be used as your project's backlog. By default, the auto-created backlog saved search is used. You can edit this search or select another search later.
      • Select Estimation filed - an integer field that you will use to estimate your tasks.
      • Select an field that will define the color of a task card. By default, the cards are not color coded, but for example, you can set to use the Priority field, and thus your task cards will be colored according to their priority value.
      • Set maximum amount of work swimlanes and tasks displayed on the board.
    • By default, the swimlanes are enabled and thus, you can close the settings and begin to work. If do not use the "user story" concept, or just do not need swimlanes — disable them.

For details about Agile Board configuration, please refer to the Configure an Agile Board section.

Last modified: 18 April 2017