Why Auto-schedule leave sprints without any assignment?

[Felix Arlandis]

Hi,

we are testing the advanced roadmaps functionality in our projects before buying the premium version of Jira and there's a behaviour we don't understand, let me give you the details of the scenario:

- Using the Improverd interface,

- backlog of 50 items all of them estimated in story points

- 4 releases scheduled (with the consequent items assigned ont he fixVersion field)

- Velocity of the team defined (using Scrum and 2 weeks Sprint Length)

- Team members left empty for now

- 2 sprints actually created in the Sprint board with some assigned items (around 10 between the 2 of them, having some in Done status, some in Progress) , the remaining 40 items are in the product backlog without sprint assignment but Ranked following the releases order). No further sprints are yet created here.

- Dependencies configured as Concurrent

- Hierarchy at Story level

- View Settings: Group by Release and Sort by Rank

When clicking on Auto-schedule I'm getting reordered in the plan the none assigned sprint items and scheduled at some point in the timeline (that's the expected thing), but when I see when they have been scheduled I realise that in the calendar there are at least a couple of future autocalculated by "Plans" sprints which don't have any task assignment ¿? causing my plan to delay beyond what it should be, any idea?

[Dave · Accepted solution]

Hi @Felix Arlandis ,

I might have misunderstood the question, but to summarise are you wanting to know why there appears to be a one sprint gap (as indicated by the yellow highlighting on your screenshot)?

If so, can I confirm that no issues are scheduled to that sprint that are not currently in view (i.e. they come into view if you scroll up or down).

Also, can I confirm if your releases have start as well as end dates? And if issues are assigned to those releases? If a release has a start date and an issue is assigned to it then the issue won't be auto-scheduled until a sprint that starts on (or after) the release start date.

In the screen shot it looks like you've configured your view to group by something, but it's not clear what that might be... the reason I ask is that it looks like it might be related - I'm wondering if you're grouping by release?

Regards,
Dave

[Felix Arlandis]

Hi Dave, thaks for your reply, find below my comments:

- "...are you wanting to know why there appears to be a one sprint gap..." --> yes, in fact there's one more in the future (but does not appear in the image).

- "...no issues are scheduled to that sprint that..." --> that's correct, note the this sprint is being automatically simulated by the auto-scheduling function since in my Agile board I just created the 3 first sprints.

- ".....can I confirm if your releases have start as well as end dates...."--> that's again correct, all dates around releases have been filled and all the 4 releases contains items assigned in th fixVersion field. As per your comments, the root couse might be the start date assigned to a Release? (I'll try removing that one and re-schedule).

- "...In the screen shot it looks like you've configured your...."  -->yes I'm grouping by release.

Thanks again Dave for your time.

[Dave]

Thanks for that update @Felix Arlandis - from what you've said I think it's definitely likely to be the start date on the releases that results in the gap. I'd be interested to know if that does turn out to be reason!

[Felix Arlandis]

Hi Dave, I can now confirm that the root cause wasthe start dates, by removing them and re-scheduling, the sprints are now completely filled. Many thanks!! :)

[Dave]

No worries @Felix Arlandis - happy to have helped!