Cannot reschedule issues in Advanced Roadmap

[Daniel Tranca]

I'm trying to create a roadmap for our product and one need that we require is that when an epic was delayed and it's period extended all dependencies should move forward in time to accommodate for the change. I made sure all settings for rescheduling issues are active and I use the auto-scheduler but nothing happens.

Here's an example

[Walter Buggenhout _ACA IT_]

Hi @Daniel Tranca,

Could you have a look into your plan settings by clicking the cog wheel next to the plan's title.

On the Scheduling page, have a look at the setting for dependencies and verify if it is set to sequential:

 

[Daniel Tranca]

Hi @Walter Buggenhout _ACA IT_ ,

Thank you very much for your quick reply. It's already set on Sequential.

[Walter Buggenhout _ACA IT_]

That's not it then. The calculations used are a complex matter, taking a lot of factors into account. Dependencies are just one of them, so there will be something else determining the behaviour.

Could you check if changing the order of issues has an impact? Just drag KW-1 below KW-6.

[Walter Buggenhout _ACA IT_]

In case re-ranking does not fix the issue yet, have a look at this page in the documentation - it explains a lot about the scheduling features.

A small extract, which may be key to analyse what is going on in your case:

When auto-scheduling the issues in a plan, several factors are considered:

• how your teams work, i.e. in sprint iterations (Scrum), or in a continuous flow of daily tasks (Kanban)
• for Scrum teams, the sprint assignments of the issues in the plan
• the sequence of issues, based on start and end release dates
• the ranking of the issues in the plan
• the dependencies between issues in the plan
• the estimates of the issues in the plan
• the number of members in your team, which determines how much work can be completed in parallel

As you can see as per my two previous hints, we were just starting to climb the ladder of influencing factors. ;-)

If you can't seem to get auto-scheduling to get it right, you can still adjust manually, right?

[Daniel Tranca]

No change

[Daniel Tranca]

Hi @Walter Buggenhout _ACA IT_ 

I did check that documentation before but none of those factors should be affecting my timeline. 

[Walter Buggenhout _ACA IT_]

Hey @Daniel Tranca,

I am 100% sure they do - computers are always right, you know ;-). But it is true that we haven't found which one it is yet.

As these are Epics which I can see are collapsed in the roadmap currently, what scheduling information do you see from the underlying issues? Either fixed or auto-calculated. 

[Daniel Tranca]

I haven't added any scheduling information to any of the Stories inside, since we want to use this road map for the next year, but don't want to estimate each story now. We would only like to estimate(roughly) the epics and build the roadmap based on that.

[Earl McCutcheon]

Hello @Daniel Tranca ,

Taking a look at your setup I believe the issue is the sequence of issues, based on the start and end release dates as covered in the "Auto-scheduling issues" documentation under the section "Auto-scheduling in the improved interface" noting the factors the calculations are based on:

When auto-scheduling the issues in a plan, several factors are considered:

• how your teams work, i.e. in sprint iterations (Scrum), or in a continuous flow of daily tasks (Kanban)
• for Scrum teams, the sprint assignments of the issues in the plan
• the sequence of issues, based on start and end release dates
• the ranking of the issues in the plan
• the dependencies between issues in the plan
• the estimates of the issues in the plan
• the number of members in your team, which determines how much work can be completed in parallel

The auto-schedule function primarily looks to adjust either empty or all values when looking at "Sprints, teams, and releases" fields directly, as stated in the dropdown selector for the feature, there are other factors that will be populated when empty as covered in the list from the documentation but when a date is manually set for start and end dates the auto-scheduler will not try to adjust them but rather flag errors in the dependencies or list negative lead time as you are seeing.

If you delete the start and end date the auto-schedule should then be able to look at those values without having the additional constraint of being set manually then set the dates schedule accordingly based on the other factors.

Regards,
Earl