Plan experimentally with scenarios in Jira
5 min
Intermediate
By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to:
- Estimate deadlines and adjust scope using scenarios
What is a scenario?
In Jira plans, you can create different scenarios to explore how changes to work scope, capacity, or deadlines affect your plans. A scenario is essentially a separate version of your existing plan where you can modify dates, assignments, work, and more however you want. You can create multiple scenarios and switch between them easily to test out many different plans.
Use scenarios to see how removing a feature from a release or adding more work to it will affect the schedule. You can also create best, worst, and median scenarios.
👉 For example: During your next sprint, your company has its annual audit. In the past, people from your team have been pulled from their current projects to help with audit prep. You can create a scenario that will show you what happens to your progress if your teams get pulled from their projects to help with the audit.
As with any change to a plan, the changes in your scenarios won’t apply across Jira until you review, select, and save the changes to Jira.
Create a scenario
Scenarios are an advanced plan feature, so you have to enable scenarios before you can create them.
To enable scenarios:
- Next to the plan name, click More actions (represented by ···), then Plan settings.
- In the settings sidebar, under Advanced, click Scenarios.
- Click Enable scenarios.
- Enter a name and choose a color for your first scenario.
- Click Create.
Your first scenario will be the plan as it is currently configured, so you’ll want to name it something like “Main version,” “Base scenario,” or “Original plan.” If you want to experiment, you’ll have to create another scenario to experiment with, or you’ll lose your original configuration.
To create additional scenarios:
- Next to the plan name, click More actions (represented by ···), then Plan settings.
- In the settings sidebar, under Advanced, click Scenarios.
- Click Create scenario.
- Enter a name and choose a color.
- You can either create a blank scenario or iterate on an existing scenario by copying it.
- Click Create.
- In the sidebar, click Go back (represented by an arrow pointing left) to go back to your plan You should now see the name of a scenario next to the plan name. You can click to switch between scenarios.
The Unsaved changes indicator will change to be the color of the scenario you’re currently viewing. If you make changes to the plan, the changes will only apply to the scenario currently selected.
👇View which scenario you're in next to the plan name.
You’ll also see the color of the scenario on the timeline to indicate where changes have been made but not yet reviewed and saved to Jira.
👇You can see indicators of the unsaved changes in your scenarios on any visible fields.
How was this lesson?
next lesson
Configure views and share plans in Jira
- Create preconfigured views in a plan
- Share a plan with stakeholders