Team Managed Jira Software Not Auto-scheduling

Question

I have created a plan, assigned Story Points and assigned Developers to issues. When I click 'auto-schedule', there are no changes made. Do I need to configure something else in each task? Do I need to assign a Sprint for each task?

My end goal is to be able to do this:

* specify a ranking for each task
* specify a developer for each task
* specify a fixed amount of hours or story points for each developer
* be able to auto set start and end dates based on the above

I have a setup in Excel that can do this quite easily but it seems to be impossible to do in Jira.

All of the resources online mention 'Advanced Roadmaps' but I can't see that anywhere in my Jira account.

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

I was thinking that would be the only available work-around, but did not have an opportunity to test it out.

jai.pancholi · Answer

Thanks for the detailed response and testing!

I appreciate that it appears the scheduling feature takes into account Teams and it does that well, it's just frustrating that it doesn't take into account people assigned.

I've managed to solve this by creating a separate Team for each person in my team; this ensures that no single person is working on more than 1 planned task at a time.

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Hello @jai.pancholi

Disclaimer: I do not use Advanced Roadmaps Plans. I am just reviewing documentation and experimenting to try to find the answers to your questions.

Scope: I believe that is referring to the checkboxes that appear next to the issues. Check the boxes for the issues that you want the auto-scheduler to schedule.

Issues need estimates: I recommend that you look at the documentation that covers estimating in more detail:
https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/estimate-and-schedule-issues-in-advanced-roadmaps/

Assignee: I don't see anything in the documentation about the auto-scheduler taking into consideration the individual Assignee for an issue. All the documentation concerning capacity talks about Teams and Sprints, not individual assignees. I did see a statement under the Capacity section that says the auto-scheduler assumes a team member can work on only one item at a time, but it is not looking at specific Assignees. It is looking only at the number of Team members ad the Team capacity. So in the Auto-scheduler's logic, those issues are assumed to be worked on by different team members without the scheduler identifying the specific team members.

Task durations:

- Have you assigned a Team to your Plan?

- Have you set the capacity for your Team?

There is a correlation between the Original Estimates and the Team Capacity and the number of Team members.

I tested by creating 3 tasks each with a "2d" duration (with a work day being 8 hours, and 5 work days per week).

My Team has one member. I set the assigned Team's capacity to 40 hours a week. With only 1 team member being able to work only 8 hours a day, each task estimated for 16 hours/2 days would indeed take 2 calendar days to complete. The auto-scheduler set the start and end date of each task to span 2 days.

Then I set the assigned Team's capacity to 80 hours a week, while still having only one team member. The auto-scheduler set the start and end date of each task to 1 calendar day. With only one member in the Team, a weekly Team capacity means that single Team member could work 16 hours a day. Each task was estimated to require 16 hours of work. Therefore each task could be completed in a single calendar day.