Autogenerate sprints from JIRA Portfolio

[Mathyn Buiteveld]

We have used the JIRA Agile plugin for some time now in our projects. Recently we decided to give JIRA Portfolio a try. In JIRA Agile we always created the scrum sprints ourselves, which worked just fine. However JIRA Portfolio can plan these sprints automatically, however we still like to use the JIRA Agile sprint overview when actually working on a sprint. So we want to drag the issues to the various stages of project development (e.g.: ToDo, Doing, Done).

So my question is: how do I automatically generate the JIRA Agile sprint from the JIRA Portfolio plugin?

[Ryan Porter]

JIRA Portfolio seems really exciting at first, until you realize that there is a HUGE piece missing: How do you communicate your plan to your teams?  After you do all of your wizardry with JIRA Portfolio, it generates a schedule.  This person should be working on this task on this day.  How is that person supposed to know that?  JIRA Portfolio generates a detailed schedule for each team member but it doesn't even have a way to generate a report to show that schedule to the people involved!  That's a basic function that really needed to be included in the minimum-viable product at the very first release.  What's the point of generating a schedule that you can't use?

The only way to use JIRA Portfolio right now is to spend a lot of time on manually communicating the schedule to people.  You have to look at the stories/tasks that it has concluded that you should be working on today, and you have to manually set up sprints.  If you use kanban then you have to manually sort the priorities on the backlog column.

At a minimum, there needs to be some way to communicate the schedule that JIRA Portfolio generates to the team members involved.  Just a simple calendar view of the schedule with an .ics export would be a huge improvement.  Ideally, it would be awesome if it could generate sprints in JIRA from the sprints that it plans.  For kanban teams it needs to be able to sort each person's backlog in priority ordering based on the schedule that it generates.  Otherwise a human has to do those things manually, and JIRA Portfolio is a tool that generates more work instead of automating work away.  It enables you to provide better release estimates, but at the cost of a LOT more project management work.

[Jeremiah Landi]

@Ryan Porter Do you know if a ticket exists for this? I would like to up vote it.

[Ryan Porter]

No, apparently not.  Amazingly enough it doesn't seem to be a big issue for many people.  So either there are lots of people using a tool like this to plan their resource allocation down to the hour who are then manually copying the resulting work schedules over into sprint plans and kanban priority rankings, or there aren't that many people using this planning automation tool.  Draw your own conclusions...

My next step on solving this problem is to explore Tempo Planner.

[Jeremiah Landi]

@Ryan Porter I saw the Tempo Planner; however, their videos didn't seem that impressive. I guess I'll go down that road as well. Thanks for the help!

[Wioleta Piechota]

There is an issue for this: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JPO-10 and it has nearly 300 votes now. Please add yours.

[Annicka Rosengren]

Hm, JIRA agile can also span several projects. And this lack of functionality was a disappointment for me

In the documentation Atlassian says that this is prioritized in the development of JIRA portfolio - see below text

What are the integrations with Jira Agile? 

Currently, the integration with JIRA Agile is relatively limited, and a high-priority item on our own roadmap to improve in upcoming versions. Priority ranks and sprint assignments can currently not be synced back, so the workflow that currently works best and we use internally is to create some of the JIRA issues on demand, prior to each each sprint. With the "Create and link new issues" capability, stories are created, show up on the according agile board, and are created in the priority order they had within JIRA Portfolio. Currently, when importing existing issues, it will require manual work to keep things in sync on both ends.

So lets hope it happens soon

[Mathyn Buiteveld]

So after some thinking I realized a potential problem with this is that JIRA Portfolio manages multiple projects while JIRA Agile is limited to one project, I think. So generating a JIRA Agile sprint from JIRA Portfolio would have to generate multiple JIRA Agile sprints across multiple boards.  

Still I'd be very interested to hear what JIRA has to say about this, are there any plans on including such a feature? It would be very convenient because right now we have to manually copy from JIRA Portfolio to JIRA Agile.

[Frits van der Holst]

Jira agile boards are based on a filter just as portfolio is, so this should not be a problem.

[kulbhushan_mayer]

Hi All, 

Not sure if this issue is resolve or not. I did a work around by creating empty sprints first in my projects and then started working on the portfolio plan and assignee stories to the sprints an it worked.

[Frits van der Holst]

I would expect that just as with the releases, you should be able to select the sprints for the team (which are synced both ways). Now I have to maintain this manually. Still better then doing this via excel, but it is indeed prone to errors. Also I am having trouble filling up the sprints (still a lot of free capacity per sprint). Perhaps this is because the stories are not small enough, but it shifts the planning considerably.

I am wondering what the roadmap planning for future Portfolio releases actually is since I cannot find it in the portfolio project itself. 

[Peter Warrick]

I too am looking forward to this functionality. Portfolio can come up with all your sprints for you. But to get them into JIRA Agile is a manual process and therefore prone to error. I'm guessing concerns of syncing a sprint that is in progress would not be something we'd want to do. In fact the sync should take that into account and update portfolio and then adjust accordingly. But for all future sprints, it should update from portfolio back to JIRA agile. 

To address the concern from Mathyn above about updating multiple boards based on the plan, I would think an on demand sync that allows you to pick which boards to update would address this. Something similar to "Apply updates to project/s" under the "Plan" pull down in Portfolio. In fact this very same button would be a good place for this to live.

Is there a issue link that you have as I'd like to watch it?