How does auto-schedule in Advanced Roadmaps use the estimates for kanban teams?

[Blake Waud]

I'm in the process of building a new instance of Jira Software Cloud for my company and we will be using the Advance Roadmap feature to help us manage and plan work for our small team. I have multiple projects on the plan and I have added several Legends, Epics, and Stories as an example to our management. I've created three shared kanban teams and added them to the plan; two of the teams have one user each and one of them has no users currently.

A number of my issues have manual start and due dates, but I just added another set of issues to try and use the auto-scheduler. It has a Legend, an Epic, and two stories. One story is the dependency of the other. Dependencies are configured to be scheduled sequentially using days. I did not add start and due dates for these two stories and one story has an estimate of 5 days and the other 10 days. The epic has an estimate of 15 days and the Legend, an estimate of 30 days. I assigned one of the teams with 1 user in it to these 4 issues.

When I click the auto-schedule button, the number of days each issue is given is far lower than the estimate. The screenshot below shows the resulting auto-schedule gives the team 1 day to complete the 5 day issue and 2 days to complete the 10 day issue. Why is this the case and how do I get the plan to respect the estimates given in the estimates field?

[Walter Buggenhout · Accepted solution]

Hi @Blake Waud,

Welcome to the community and thank you for that extensive explanation. My guess is that your team's capacity is causing the issue. 

Navigate to the settings of your Automation team and verify what is specified there as the weekly capacity:

If my hunch is right, the value will probably be higher than the actual capacity of 1 person that you have in your team.

Hope this helps!

[Blake Waud]

@Walter Buggenhout Thank you for responding, that did seem to fix it, sort of, but the strange thing is now with the Kanban team setting, it seems to automatically set the team's capacity based on the number of people in the team if you don't manually configure it, but it doesn't respect it for estimating. The team card said 40 hours weekly capacity before I configured it, and 40 hours weekly capacity after I put 40 hours in the configuration box. But the auto-scheduler behaved completely differently. Seems like a bug to me...

[Thiago Ferrari]

Hi, Have you figured this out?

I'm currently in the same situation and still trying to understand, but it doesn't make much sense.

Not only I have the problem that @Walter Buggenhout  mentioned, but I also can't understand the following:

I have 2 stories that have and estimate of 5 days each. Each one is set to different people, but both of them are in the same team (Kanban - 80hours weekly of capacity - 40x2). 

The auto-scheduler always changes the start date of story B after story A, even though they are not dependents and could be done in parallel by two different people.

Do you have any light in this?