How does release planning work?
You can use release planning to do longer-term planning that spans multiple sprints, or covers longer periods of work done in Kanban boards. A release can represent an actual release or delivery that you make to your stakeholders or customers during a project, or can be used as an internal milestone. It can also represent the entire output of a project that has a single delivery at the end of the project. For example, a release might take 3 to 6 months, and consist of 5 to 10 sprints.
You can have multiple releases in planning at the same time. So, you can plan multiple releases ahead, and adjust the contents of each release as your priorities change over time.
The contents of a release is the backlog items that you assign to it. You can assign backlog items using drag and drop, or the right-click menu.
Release planning uses the rough estimates of the assigned backlog items. For example, the rough estimates are used for predicting release dates, and for release burnup charts. This is different from sprints and Kanban boards, where the detailed estimates are used.
The actual work on the backlog items is done using sprints or Kanban boards, exactly like you would do if you weren't using release planning. You can assign the backlog items to any sprints or Kanban boards you want, in any order. So, a release doesn't have a tight coupling to a specific sequence of sprints, or to specific Kanban boards. It's up to you which sprints or Kanban boards you use to complete the backlog items in a release.
When you are ready to start the actual work on a release, start the release by clicking "Start this release". This is typically done on the day where the first sprint in the release starts.
During the work on the release, you can keep track of the progress using the release burnup chart for the release.
When your release is done, complete the release by clicking "Complete this release". This is typically done on or after the day where you complete the last sprint in the release and there is no more work to do be done in the release (at least as far as your project in Scrumwise is concerned).