Advanced roadmaps - capacity planning calculation when setting start date to a past date

[Ori Yudilevich]

Hi,

We are currently in the process of setting up advanced roadmaps to manage our projects and plan the capacity of our teams. As part of this set up, we are filling in the estimates (days), start date and due date of all of our issues, also ones that are already at the review or testing phase and whose start date is in the past (say 1-3 weeks ago).

However, when I choose to display the capacity in our timeline, the capacity calculation seems to schedule all issues in the current or future weeks. This causes the capacity to appear in red, even though if the capacity were spread out across the lifetime of the issue (between start and due time), then we should not be at over capacity, since a lot of the work has already been done.

How can I solve this problem? Is there another way I should be scheduling things retroactively? 

Thanks in advance, Ori

[Ori Yudilevich]

Hi again,

I made some progress in understanding how the capacity planning works, here is an update. An issue in Jira has the fields "Original estimate" and "Time tracking", where "Time tracking" is a field that has two values: "Time logged" and "Time remaining". In a plan, you can display a field called "Estimates". I was under the impression that "Estimates" in the plan displays the "Original estimate" of an issue, but it turns out that it displays the "Time remaining" (which I find very confusing, why not have consistent terminology?). The "Time remaining" is also the field that is used in the calculation of the capacity.

To solve the problem I mentioned above, the solution is to log the hours that were already spent on an issue in the "Time Tracking" field, and then these hours will not be counted in the capacity planning. The downside is that those hours will also disappear from the "Estimates" field in the plan, since that field actually means "Time remaining". So if you want to use the "Estimates" field to actually get an overview of the amount of work an epic has, for example, then you are in a catch.

To Jira developers / product owners, I would recommend the following small changes in the plan:

- Rename "Estimates" to "Time remaining", which is what it is and will be more transparent to the user.

- Allow us to add the field "Original estimate" in the plan, since this is very relevant information when you make a plan for a roadmap or want to see the development cost of an epic, also after you finished it.