Portfolio (new experience) does not honor estimates for auto-schedule

[Bruno Colin]

On Portfolio version 3.1 - new experience.

I do not understand how the "Target start" and the "Target end" fields are computed by the scheduler.

My configuration is:

• Kanban team with 40h weekly capacity
• One release planned for 03 July 2019
• One story (US1) with estimates of 10 days
• A second story (US2) with estimates of 30 days depending on the first one (US1).

After auto-schedule, the start date and end date are as follow:

• US1: 9 May -> 15 May (6 days)
• US2: 16 May -> 04 Jun (19 days)

I would have expected that the minimum would be the estimates with potentially the weekend added.

I would also assume that, due to the dependency, the minimum elapsed days would be 40 days whatever the team capacity is as the documentation states that there is only one assignee by issue.

[Dave · Accepted solution]

Hi Bruno,

The default working hours for a day is considered to be 8 hours. So if you have an issue that is expected to take 10 days then it's assumed to take 80 hours of work. If your team works 40 hours a week then it would be expected to take 2 weeks of work. It is assumed that regardless of team size that only one person will work on any issue, but the working hours are distributed evenly between team members.

So assuming you only have one person in your team and it's going to take 10 working days then taking weekends into account it could be scheduled to take anywhere between 12 and 14 days (depending when weekends fall).

I've tried this out in the most recent Portfolio code and this is what I'm seeing - however, I haven't checked against 3.1.0 so it's possible that there were bugs in earlier versions.

I'm actually quite surprised you got as few as 6 days with the configuration and estimates that you've provided.

Can you check the values you've provided so that I can double check - possibly even providing some screenshots of the before and after auto-scheduled output?

Many thanks,
Dave

[Bruno Colin]

Dear Dave,

I have tried again and now it is working as expected, but:

* I had to "save the change in JIRA"

* I had to refresh the browser page

While it is ok for me, it could be annoying if you want to play with your planning without wanting to commit the changes back to JIRA.

Best regards,

Bruno

[Dave]

Hi Bruno,

It shouldn't actually be necessary to save the changes to Jira, however I do know that we had some issues with the estimates fields not triggering a refreshed calculated schedule (we cache old calculation results if we don't believe any data has changed) caused by a failure to recognise that the field value has changed.

This can occur when immediately clicking on the "Auto-schedule" button with focus still in the estimate field and should hopefully be resolved in 3.2.0. 

If you continue to have problems with this then I would suggest that you raise a support issue as this sounds like a bug,

Regards,

Dave