Ken,

Don't let all the different pieces overwhelm you, sounds like there is some confusion around actually planning practices and product functionality. Sounds like you have the planning concepts, don't let the Scrum terminology get you stuck if you are not comfortable with Story/Epic style planning.

The notion of plan vs execution is a convenience and configurable based on your needs( Process Configuration: Configuration>Project Configuration>Configuration Data>Planning>Top Level Work Item Types).

Think of a real world scenario, where you have dozens of "plan" items going into a release and hundreds of corresponding "execution" items, the idea is to allow a people responsible for planning work effectively and still be able to mange by only viewing high level "plan" items and focusing on planning high level items for releases and iterations, while at the team or iteration level plan you may only have a few plan items and it is more manageable and useful to view a few dozen "execution" items where you can also see the team load and do assignments directly in the plan. So if you are seeing too much in your plan you can filter the "execution" items out of your high level plans and focus on the "plan" items for your. So for small teams this is a matter of preference, but as you grow larger this seemingly simple distinction is very useful.

-Sean

Hi Ken,

I tried to provide some explanation on the basic concepts here http://jazz.net/library/article/589. I am still working on enhancing it.

Sean sums it up nicely.

Ralph

IN the RTC documentation it mentions in several places about TOP LEVEL or PLANNING work items?? What exactly are these? It mentions Stories if you use Scrum, but what and how are they used. Do you typically associate "effort" or time worked with these PLAN types? So a simple scenario is using Defect, Enhancement and Task. Use a Story in there for the Top Level or Plan work item type. So all 4 of these, defects, enhancements, tasks and Stories get assigned (planned for) to some iteration plan. Say we use Tasks to track everyones work, i.e. Stories, Defects and Enhancements don't actually track the work, they are just assigned to the plan to show what gets done in the plan, but Tasks are also assigned and that's where people work, so the Tasks get linked to specific iteration plans and associated Stories, Defect or Enhancements.... So now I look at my plan and see all these different work items, I'm trying to figure out "status", work load, progress.... It's confusing with all these different types?? what exactly are those PLAN items supposed to tell me? Just that that top level work was done in that iteration, but not how much work went into it, the current status or progress????

The documentation is pretty confusing on how you're suppose to setup and use these Top-Level and Execution level work item types??

thanks

Ken