Distribute remaining effort only over time remaining?

Alessa Jaeger _LSY_

Hi to all,

we use the Roadmap pluging for work planning for a kanban team.

It is possible to set the team capacity and then the "remaining effort" field for each story in the plan. The Roadmap plugin distributes the "remaining effort" over whole planned time period for  a certain story. 

Expected behavior:
* remaining effort is distributed over remaining time (today until due date)

Observed behavior
* remaining effort is distributed over whole planned time (start date until due date)
** This is valid for "original estimate", but it isn't valid for "remaining effort"

Requirements behind my expectation:
* We configured the plan to show the available/planed capacity of a team in timeline. If we make no progress on a certain story, i.e. "remaining effort" is not changed, we need to do the remaining effort in a shorter time period for each day which pass by and no progress was made (the due date is fixed). That's why we expect to have the remaining effort distributed along the remaining time only.
* We always want to have an updated view on future workload in our team

Questions:
* Is my expectation correct? If not, why?
* Is it possible to configure a roadmap plan to fit to my expectation?
* Is there another way, to fulfill requirements described above?

Thanks in advance and best regards,

Alessa

Angus Russell_tybhkx

Hi Alessa,

We've recently released a new capacity distribution algorithm that should address this issue for you. You can find the release notes here, but here's the relevant part.

Advanced Roadmaps for Jira - Better Kanban Capacity Algorithm

This update changes how Advanced Roadmaps allocates capacity to Kanban teams for issues that last longer than one week. Before, the capacity of an issue would be spread out evenly across all weeks. With this update, issues will now consume the remaining capacity of an iteration before consuming capacity from next one. For example, if you have an issue that takes 40 hours over the course of two weeks, instead of allotting 20 hours per week, Advanced Roadmaps will now assign as many hours as possible to the first week, then place the remaining hours in the second.

To learn more about this change, see the Understanding team capacity documentation.

The release notes don't mention anything about capacity being distributed into the past as you're describing, but that is addressed with the new algorithm. Essentially this update brings the Kanban capacity distribution algorithm inline with the Scrum version.

It sounds like you don't have this update yet, so I assume your organisation is enrolled in Release Tracks (bundled fortnightly product updates rather than continuous product updates). If that is the case, you should start seeing the feature between November 9 and November 11.

Please let us know if it doesn't meet your expectations.

Thanks,

Angus