Receive Indicator That Release is Off Track. What does this Mean and How Do I fix?

John Bacon May 20, 2022

When creating my roadmap in JIRA, I noticed a warning indicator that states my releases are off track as shown in the screenshot.  For example in the screenshot it shows my May  release is off track by 3 days and my June release is off track by 4 days.  I don't understand what this means, how JIRA is determining this or how to fix it.  

Screenshot 2022-05-20 095342.jpgScreenshot 2022-05-20 095452.jpg

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Michael Andolfatto
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May 20, 2022

Hi @John Bacon ,

Releases in Jira's roadmaps can be thought of as deadlines when they have a Release Date set. This is saying that all issues assigned to Release X need to be completed before X date to have the release be considered "on-track".

Currently, Jira is telling you that you are off-track by three days because the team(s) you have created to work on the issues do not have enough capacity to resolve everything in the given timeframe. - An example would be that you have one team with a capacity of 40 hours that is trying to complete 50 hours worth of work in an iteration.

To amend this, you can do a few things:

  • Push back the release date (modify time)
  • Increase your team's capacity (modify resources)
  • Move some issues into a different release (modify scope)

These are the three corners of the Iron Triangle which is an interesting concept when working with Agile projects.

John Bacon May 20, 2022

@Michael Andolfatto I looked at the road map, and it shows there are only 13 story points in the release, but my teams Sprint Velocity is set to 30 points.  So why is it telling me my release is off track, if the work is less than the teams sprint velocity?

John Bacon May 20, 2022

@Michael Andolfatto Something else that doesn't make sense is when I filter to only show the issues that are part of the release, the story point rollup to the epic level, story points don't add up as you can see in the screenshot.  For the epic it shows 13 points, however the total points for the stories in the epic only add up to 7.

Screenshot 2022-05-20 114049.jpg

Michael Andolfatto
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May 20, 2022

@John Bacon if you filter your roadmap to only display issues assigned to your May release, you should see at least one issue which extends past the vertical marker (May 20th according to your screenshot)

All issues assigned to your May release need to finish prior to this deadline. If using Advanced Roadmaps, the auto-schedule button can automatically fix this (if you let it overwrite sprint dates) or else you can manually specify the start/end dates by changing the sprint the issues belong to, or the date fields that affect its scheduling. (This should also be able to be done by manually dragging the issues left)

If it fails to update as written above, then there may be some other issue responsible - e.g. Issue A which has a Blocker relationship with Issue B, that prevents Issue B from being completed earlier.

John Bacon May 20, 2022

@Michael Andolfatto Ok.  I found the issue.  For some reason, one of the stories assigned to the release even though it was complete was using the target end date of the sprint it was assigned to which ends May 23rd, however we have a May 20th release.  We probably need to adjust our release schedule so that a monthly release occurs after the completion of the final sprint in the month to prevent this in the future I think.

John Bacon May 20, 2022

@Michael Andolfatto Any idea why my story points in the roadmap aren't rolling up correctly. As you see in the screenshot, the stories in the epic only add up to 7 points, however the epic is reflecting 13 points.

Michael Andolfatto
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May 20, 2022

@John Bacon - I don't believe ignores issues that have been filtered out. If you remove the filters you have selected, do all of the stories add up to 13?

John Bacon May 20, 2022

@Michael Andolfatto It looks like for some reason, when you apply a filter, the roadmap doesn't adjust the rollup of story points.  So in this case all stories in the epic add up to 13, the filtered stories only added up to 7, but the parent epic still displayed the rollup value of all stories regardless of the filter applied.  Maybe that's something I should recommend they change/fix.  In my opinion, when you apply a filter, the hours/story points rollup should adjust based on the filter.

Michael Andolfatto
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May 20, 2022

@John Bacon - I can definitely understand the use case and it may make a helpful feature. I think the angle they are approaching it from is that filtering items really just removes them from view so that users can focus on the items on their screen without getting overwhelmed. It should not necessarily mean that an Epic is reduced in size or that its schedule is modified just because I'm focusing on the issues underneath that belong to one of the three teams.

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