The Planning Workspace

The Planning Workspace is designed for backlog refinement, sprint scoping, and release planning. It brings honesty to future commitments by aggregating individual confidence intervals into a complete project scope range.

Default Workspace Presets

When you select the Planning workspace:

• Status Filter: Automatically selects incomplete status categories (To Do and In Progress).
• Default Sort (Uncertainty): Sorts the backlog descending by absolute uncertainty range (High - Low). Issues with the widest spread bubble to the top.

Planning Scorecards

At the top of the workspace, two contextual scorecards provide immediate visibility into scope and backlog hygiene:

1. Total Scope Card

Aggregates estimates across all displayed issues in the current query:

• Low Estimate: The best-case scenario if all planned tasks execute smoothly.
• High Estimate: The realistic worst-case commitment ceiling if typical risks materialize.
• Uncertainty %: The relative spread between the Low and High bounds ((High - Low) / High * 100). Hovering over the percentage opens a detailed breakdown tooltip.

2. Actions Card (Find & Fix)

Scans the displayed issues for unestimated work:

• If all issues have range estimates, displays a green All Estimated banner.
• If issues are missing estimates, displays an alert: X Issues Unestimated with an interactive Find & Fix button. Clicking Find & Fix instantly filters the table to show only unestimated tickets, allowing you to estimate them inline in minutes.

De-risking Backlogs Prior to Sprint Commitment

The Planning Workspace turns estimation from a passive guessing game into an active risk management tool:

1. Identify the Riskiest Work: Because the table sorts by Uncertainty by default, the most volatile tickets appear at the very top.
2. Confront the High Bound: For each high-uncertainty ticket, ask: "Is this worst-case acceptable if it happens?"
3. Trigger Investigations Before Committing: If a 2-week worst-case is unacceptable for a 1-day task, you may want to schedule a short technical task to investigate the unknowns and narrow the range before committing.