Unable to find unassigned issues

[Stephen Sayler]

Jira Advanced Roadmaps says I have 12, 15, 14, 9, 7 unassigned issues in the next few sprints when I click on the sprint name. This is surprising, because I frequently look at these upcoming sprints in the backlog view for planning.

Unfortunately, when I try any of the following methods to find them, no dice:

• CTA on hover modal: View sprint in Jira
• Filter issues by this sprint, and status = unassigned
• Backlog quick filter for unassigned 
• JQL search: sprint = "8-31-2020" and assignee is EMPTY

I tried assigning all epics and initiatives. I looked for subtasks, but couldn't find any. Are there any other places I should look? 

For now I'm trying to ignore it - but it's really distracting. 

[Rhys Christian · Accepted solution]

Hey Stephen,

Thanks for reaching out. It's fair to say this particular insight isn't easy to diagnose from the label. What this is really saying is: "There's x issues scheduled in the sprint but not assigned to it". This could simply be that stories or epics are scheduled across the sprint (based on dates) but isn't assigned to it. Cases like this are OK - we just provide the insight. This is also why your steps to investigate wouldn't help find the relevant issues.

To be honest the main reason for insight is less relevant now. Previously, capacity for sprints used to only consider stories assigned to the sprint, and wouldn't consider points from stories simply scheduled within the sprint timeframe. Following modifications to the calculation of planned capacity, we now also consider unassigned issues.

I hope this helps provide context around this. Please let me know if you have further questions or pains with this.

Cheers,

[Stephen Sayler]

Rhys,

Thanks for the guidance, I found that Roadmaps is warning about my Epics and Initiatives that are happening during these sprints being unassigned to these sprints. This was not obvious to me initially since I didn't consider that Epics could belong to a sprint. 

Assigning them to individual sprints fixes the Unassigned count, but it also blows up my capacity plan because these large hierarchy issues are too big to fit in any one sprint. 

Allowing me to schedule an epic / initiative across multiple future sprints seems like it would fix this new issue, but I cannot do that from Advanced Roadmaps or the regular Jira interface. 

It would be nice if Jira automatically populated future sprints based on dates associated to the sprints, and dates associated to the epic / initiative. Then, based on capacity warnings, it would be easier to make appropriate planning adjustments by hiring team members to increase capacity and velocity, or pushing out epic / initiative start and end dates.