Recalculating in Portfolio assigns sprints that are in the past

[Marianne Phinney]

I have a large portfolio plan with over a dozen teams and about 15 initiatives.  I set custom sprints for each team because they each have their own sprint schedules and sprint names.  I set them as fixed and included the start and end dates. I only included forward sprints from the time I set up the plan.

Now whenever the plan recalculates, some of the stories are assigned to sprints that are in the past, even when the status is in Backlog and they're not estimated.  This makes the plan look much more optimistic than I should.  I've been fixing those manually but it's a lot of tedium. Am I doing something wrong or is this a bug? Should I be deleting the custom sprints after they are closed?

[Martin Suntinger]

Hi Marianne, JIRA Portfolio currently doesn't really know a concept of past/closed sprints, it just schedules from the start date of the plan. The start date is determined in the following way: 

• If a plan update has been run, then the schedule starts from the last plan update date (Plan > Update from date)
• If no update was done yet, but there is a release with a fixed start date, the schedule starts from the start date of the earliest release
• Otherwise the plan starts from today

Basically all sprints that are defined after the the schedule starts, are taken. 

The intended process is to regularly run a plan update (Plan > Update from date), e.g. after every sprint, or weekly. With that, you set a new start date for the plan, i.e., schedule whatever is remaining from the beginning of the next sprint or week. Fixed sprints that are before that date will then be ignored.

The alternative is to indeed just delete the custom sprints from the plan.