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Planview Customer Success Center

What is a Flow Item?

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Last Updated:   |  Applicable Viz Versions: All

Answer

A Flow Item is a unit of business value pulled by a stakeholder through a product’s value stream. Each unit of work undertaken by a software delivery organization can be categorized as one — and only one — of the four Flow Items or as a supporting artifact.

Flow Item

About this Flow Item

Examples

Feature

Delivers
New business value

Pulled By
Customers

Description
New value added to drive a business result; visible to the customer

  • Feature

  • Epic

  • User Story

  • Requirement

Defect

Delivers
Quality

Pulled By
Customers

Description
Fixes for quality problems that affect the customer experience

  • Defect

  • Bug

  • Problem

  • Incident

  • Change

Risk

Delivers
Security, governance, compliance

Pulled By
Security and risk officers

Description
Work to address security, privacy, and compliance exposures

  • Vulnerability

  • Regulatory Requirement

  • Security Issue

Debt

Delivers
Removal of impediments to future delivery

Pulled By
Architects

Description
Improvement of the software architecture and operational architecture

  • Technical Debt

  • API Addition

  • Refactoring

  • Infrastructure Automation

Supporting Artifact

Delivers
Quality, value, etc

Pulled By
Architects, customers, QA, etc

Description
Supplementary artifacts that are not true Flow Items

  • Documentation Task

  • Release

  • Test Case