New experience auto-scheduling - How to lock a story to a sprint or a date?

[Georgii Lumpov]

Hello! Today I was reading through the article Scheduling work (nice one BTW!) and was playing around with the updated Portfolio in order to get prepared for a coming PI planning in my team.

The following question I was not able to answer on my own. Give me a hand please :)

So I want to respect certain "external dependency" which forces one of the stories to be within a very specific sprint (or a time frame). With the new abilities enabled for auto-scheduling I could have just assigned that story to a specific sprint and then say "Hey, please auto-schedule everything that has no sprint assigned". But... this case is just very rare. I have no sprints assigned to 100% of the stories only during PI planning.

What should I do in a similar case in the middle of a PI? I have tons of stories already assigned to their sprints and probably I will be able to achieve the desired result  by playing wit the story order relative to the other stories, but maybe there is a better approach?

Maybe I can say "this story is locked here in place", maybe even within that same interface that is used for dependencies. And then when I click "Auto-Schedule" it allows me 3 options instead of two in Sprints column. Like this...

Another use-case for this can be this → it is very common to set certain buffers into sprints. E.g. in order to:

• Reserve time for bug-fixes (this is a sort of "let's try to take our good old waterfall and get married it to SAFe)
• Respect certain mass-vacations or holidays. Since going forward it it not going to be done via teams availability (per this) "Resource join date, leave dates, and availabilities — These details are no longer available in the improved interface, and have no impact when issues are auto-scheduled."

I could easily do that with a story locked to a sprint :)

[Georgii Lumpov]

del.