Auto-schedule is modifying orginal estimate according to the team hours allocation

[Anthony GERARD]

Hey,

We are working on a plan on a project. We tried the config Kanban and SCRUM and we have the same issue with the Auto-schedule feature.

1. We setup all the original estimate on all tasks of our board. 

2. We assigned a team to all the tasks that we created in the plan overview. For this team, we added 70 hours per week with 2 members (irl, 35 hours / week / person). 

3. We added all the dependencies between all these tasks. 

4. We have seen that the auto-schedule modified some estimated duration of tasks by "spending" some hours from the pool of the team. For example, a task that was initially planned for 2 days (7 hours per day), has been modified to 1 day (14 hours in one day). 


This issue is a big problem for our plan because for all our tasks, we can only have one worker per task and the fact that we have 10 employees in the developement will obviously not accelerate the development of the task by 10.

How can i add some constraints to the auto-schedule feature to only have one person (from the team set up) used per task and avoid any modification of the initial original estimate? 

PS: we also tried some modifications on the configuration of the auto-schedule like "dependencies config (Sequential/Concurrent)" or Inferred dates, ..., we always add the same issue.

Best regards

[Sahir Maharaj]

Hello @Anthony GERARD

Based on my experience, the auto-schedule feature in Jira Advanced Roadmaps recalculates task durations based on team capacity, which may not align with your single-worker-per-task constraint. To address this, you can disable or adjust capacity-based scheduling by removing team hours from the configuration or setting tasks to a "Fixed" duration mode. This would ensure your original estimates remain unchanged.

If the issue persists, try applying constraints like setting task dependencies to "Sequential" and verifying that team assignments don’t override individual task estimates. If these changes don’t resolve the problem, I’d recommend contacting Atlassian support at https://support.atlassian.com/contact/#/ for more detailed assistance.

[Anthony GERARD]

Hey @Sahir Maharaj thank you for the answer

I tried to find this option to set up as a "Fixed" duration mode but i did not find this feature, would you be able to give me more details about it?

Thanks

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @Anthony GERARD and welcome to the Community!

Starting off with a small detail, but probably worth mentioning to avoid any confusion: if your auto-scheduler does overwrite certain fields, it's definitely worth having a look at its configuration and decide if you really want to allow the tool to do this. In many cases, you rather prefer it not to overwrite any values (estimates nor dates) you entered yourself and let it focus on calculating the schedule of work on the timeline.

The auto scheduler uses an algorithm that takes a large set of variables into account and that does indeed make it hard to understand sometimes. Because of the many factors involved, it is very difficult (to virtually impossible) to point out exactly what you need to do to adjust the auto scheduler to perform the way you expect it to (sometimes it's even a matter of adjusting expectations).

Nevertheless, Atlassian has made a decent attempt to explain the logic behind it, and I can definitely recommend you to review it in the articles below. It may give you a better understanding of how it works and how you may leverage it better:

• How does the auto-scheduler in advanced roadmaps work: an introduction in the basic principles behind the auto-scheduler.
• Configure the auto-scheduler in advanced roadmaps: a short article about the settings you can actually adjust for the auto-scheduler, including which fields to overwrite or not.
• Assign capacity from your timeline: this article explains how your team's capacity is calculated and how the tool allocates that capacity.
• Capacity in scrum vs kanban teams in advanced roadmaps: even though kanban does not use sprints, this article explains how even for kanban teams, 'virtual iterations of 1 week' are used behind the scenes.

Hope this helps! 

[Anthony GERARD]

Hey @Walter Buggenhout thanks ! 

I agree about the fact that i would like to avoid any modification from the auto-schedule feature to my estimation etc... 

The problem is more "how can i do it"? I tried to go through the options of the auto-scheduler and there is not so much on my side. Except some configurations like "Sequential" / "Concurrent", it seems not so configurable

Do you know a patch to be able to have this type of configuration (avoid to modify X, Y, ...)

Thanks