Agile sprints are a fantastic approach to managing your backlog tasks efficiently while prioritizing high-impact product development features. At its core, a sprint represents a fixed period where planned work is completed, promoting accountability and steady progress.

Statuses play a crucial role in tracking tasks through their lifecycle. In this model, we’ll leverage statuses as steps in the task progression, helping to visualize and manage workflows effectively.

In a straightforward development workflow, the task statuses could be defined as:

This model allows teams to clearly identify what stage a task is in, ensuring smooth transitions and visibility.

For teams looking for more granularity, especially in software development workflows, the statuses can be tailored to reflect each stage of the process more precisely.

In a more granular approach, statuses could evolve as follows:

By breaking down each stage in this way, teams can better manage complex workflows, ensuring that each task moves smoothly from concept to completion.

Regardless of your workflow style, these statuses are fully customizable. Simply adjust the status names to align with your specific process—whether you're managing product development, IT tickets, or marketing tasks. The flexibility of this model ensures that it can fit any team's needs, providing clarity and improving efficiency.

By setting clear statuses and defining task lifecycles, teams can streamline their processes, ensuring transparency, accountability, and optimized delivery.

Many of the suggestions we use in our example can be applied to any style of workflow by simply changing the Status names as they adhere to your workflow process.

In the above example, I've assigned someone to the Review Status so that any Task that enters the Status is automatically assigned to that person. You'll also note that we've populated our Backlog with a bunch of Tasks that we want to tackle at some point. Our next step is getting those tasks engaged into a Sprint.

One of the staples of the Agile workflow is that sprints (collections of tasks that we want to achieve together) are clustered by time and not by scope. If Tasks in our Sprint aren't complete by the end of the sprint, we'll shift them to the next sprint rather than hold up the release.

Therefore, we can decide in advance how long our sprints should be through pre-panning. The two-week sprints seems to be an industry favorite, so let's create a Milestone that's two weeks long.

We can set Milestones to recur in two-week intervals so that our next sprint is automatically generated for us. We would do so with the following parameters:

Every: Period

In: Bi-weekly

On: Monday (or whichever day you start your sprints)

Then Set Recurring.

Now we have our first sprint made and a bunch of tasks that we'd like to eventually accomplish. At this step, we're going to dedicate some of the Tasks in our Backlog Status to our Sprint 1 Milestone.

In the below .gif, we've switched from Board View to List View to make it easier to take advantage of some of Nifty's Bulk Actions.

By holding down Shift + clicking the first and sixth task, I've selected all of them at once. If you wish to pick and choose specific tasks that aren't all in a row, hold down command (on Mac) or ctrl (on Windows) and click on the specific tasks you'd like.

Then we tied these tasks to the Sprint 1 Milestone. We can see these tasks automatically pick up the due date of the Sprint 1 Milestone, though these due dates can be changed to land anywhere within the date range of our two week sprint.

With the same Bulk Action, we're going to relocate these Tasks from the Backlog Status to the To Do Status since they've been selected as part of our current sprint.

We can then reference these Tasks from within our Sprint 1 Milestone. We can move Tasks down the Kanban board from our Milestone as well, and even Complete them to see the progress updated in real time.

Once your sprint is finished in two weeks, a new one is created, and we can shift unfinished Tasks from this sprint, as well as new Tasks, into the new sprint.