Timeline & PI Planning

The Timeline module provides a collaborative Program Increment (PI) planning and sprint scheduling engine. Designed for agile engineering teams, it bridges high-level architectural roadmaps with tactical delivery schedules by combining drag-and-drop sprint boards, real-time team capacity management, date-based milestones, and interactive Gantt charts.

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1. Program Increments & Sprints

Program Increments (PIs) provide multi-sprint planning intervals (typically 8–12 weeks) that align engineering delivery with architectural milestones.

Adding a Program Increment

1. In the Timeline toolbar, click + Program Increment (or + PI).
2. The editor automatically initializes a new planning interval (e.g., PI 1, PI 2) starting seamlessly on the day following the previous PI's conclusion.
3. Sprints within the PI default to standard two-week (14-day) durations.

Sprint Management & Cascading Dates

• Adding Sprints: Click + Sprint on any PI to add subsequent sprints.
• Adjusting Durations: Modify a sprint's end date directly from the sprint header date picker.
• Automatic Cascading: Start and end dates for subsequent sprints automatically adjust when an earlier sprint is lengthened or shortened, keeping the timeline perfectly contiguous without manual re-calculation.

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2. Milestones & Date-Based Markers

Milestones represent critical temporal events, releases, regulatory checkpoints, and architectural gates across the delivery timeline.

Creating a Milestone Marker

1. Click + Marker in the timeline toolbar or click the milestone indicator on any sprint column.
2. Select the milestone category:
   • Release (📦): Planned software or capability release.
   • Deadline (🚩): Contractual, regulatory, or external target deadline.
   • Review (📋): Architecture, security, or stakeholder review gate.
   • Launch (🚀): Production go-live or public deployment.
   • Code Freeze (❄️): Stabilization cutoff date prior to deployment.
   • PI Boundary (📅): Planning interval transition marker.
3. Enter a title, scheduled calendar date, optional version tag (e.g., v2.4.0), and descriptive markdown notes.
4. Associate specific requirement items or delivery tickets with the milestone.

Milestones appear as distinctive colored point-in-time indicators on sprint headers and Gantt chart timelines.

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3. Workable Item Assignment & Scheduling

The timeline board features a backlog drawer for scheduling unassigned actionable items (Tickets, Workable Requirements, etc.) into target sprints.

Scheduling Items

• Backlog Drawer: Open the Backlog drawer on the left to view all unassigned workable items.
• Drag-and-Drop: Drag tickets directly from the backlog into any sprint column, or drag items between sprints to re-sequence work.
• Inline Editing: Set story point estimates, update status (To Do, In Progress, Done), and assign team members directly on the sprint card.

Real-Time Impact Preview

When dragging items across the board, the drop target displays a live impact preview.

The preview highlights projected point totals, updated capacity percentages, and immediate warning badges if the assignment introduces dependency order violations.

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4. Capacity Planning & Reservations

Effective PI planning requires accounting for operational overhead, maintenance, and uncertainty rather than allocating 100% of raw developer bandwidth to new features.

Configuring Capacity Reservations

Click Reservations on any PI to configure capacity buffers.

• Reservation Units: Allocate buffers as Story Points or as a Percentage of Total Capacity (e.g., 20%).
• Categories: Tag reservations for specific operational needs:
  • Risk Buffer: Absorbs scope discovery and estimation variance.
  • Bugs & Maintenance: Accounts for incoming defect triage and production support.
  • Technical Debt: Dedicated refactoring, dependency upgrades, and infrastructure hardening.
  • Meetings & Ceremonies: Sprint planning, demos, and organizational overhead.
• Scope: Apply reservations globally across all sprints in the PI, or target individual sprints (e.g., reserving extra hardening capacity during a pre-release sprint).

Live Sprint Capacity Bar

Every sprint column displays a live capacity gauge comparing planned story points against available net capacity. The bar updates dynamically as tickets are added, resized, or reassigned.

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5. Board View vs. Gantt Chart View

The timeline provides dual viewing modes tailored for sprint-level execution and executive roadmapping.

Switching Modes

Click the view toggle in the toolbar to switch between:

• Board View: Columnar view organized by Program Increment and Sprint, optimized for backlog grooming and card dragging.
• Gantt Chart: Horizontal timeline visualizing work streams, epics, and milestone deadlines across months and quarters.

Inferred Epic Scheduling

The Gantt chart automatically computes start and end spans for high-level Epics based on the scheduled dates of their underlying child tickets:

• Automatic Date Spans: An Epic's timeline bar spans from the start of its earliest child ticket's sprint to the conclusion of its latest child ticket's sprint.
• Epic Filtering: Use the Epic filter dropdown in the toolbar to isolate a single initiative across the timeline.

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6. Dependency & Blocker Visualization

Scheduling mistakes, such as scheduling a dependent ticket before its prerequisite is completed, are flagged automatically.

• Schedule Conflict Warnings: If Ticket B depends on Ticket A, but Ticket B is placed in an earlier sprint than Ticket A, the system flags the conflict with a visual warning badge (⚠️).
• Risk Indicators: Hovering over conflict badges displays the exact relationship chain and recommends re-scheduling adjustments.

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7. Collaborative PI Planning

During team-wide PI planning sessions, multiple engineers, architects, and product managers can work on the timeline simultaneously:

• Live Peer Presence: Colored presence avatars on sprint cards and detail modals show which items other participants are currently inspecting or editing.
• Zero-Conflict Sync: Sprint re-ordering, ticket assignments, and capacity adjustments propagate instantaneously across all connected clients via peer-to-peer WebRTC signaling.