Automating Due Date Adjustments Based on Team Size in Jira using Jira Automation

[alex_h]

Hi Jira Community!

I'm looking for some guidance on automating adjustments to the Due Dates of Epics based on the number of engineers working on them. We typically use Start Date and Due Date to schedule our work, which works fine when a single engineer is involved. For example, if an Epic is estimated to take 1 month with 1 engineer, the Due Date is set accordingly.

However, if we assign two engineers to the same Epic, we'd expect the work to take about half the original time (2 weeks). I'm trying to find a way to automatically update the Due Date in Jira to reflect this change when the number of engineers varies.

Here's what I've tried so far:

• Duration in Days Fields: I created one to calculate the working days between the Start Date and Due Date.
• Contributors Field: I added another custom field to indicate the number of engineers working on the Epic.

I'm struggling with how to link these fields to automatically adjust the Due Date based on the number of contributors. Currently, only one engineer can be officially assigned to a ticket, so I've been experimenting with automation to manage this scenario, but it feels a bit clunky.

Any advice or insights on how to streamline this process would be greatly appreciated!

[Bill Sheboy · Accepted solution]

Hi @alex_h -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

First, a couple of suggestions around what you are trying to do...

Please consider the idea of "estimate size; derive duration" (originally from Mike Cohn, I recall.)  Capturing the sizing forecast may help to create a delivery plan for a duration forecast.  And so preserving the inputs and assumptions aids adjustments and learning later when something changes (e.g., an invalid assumption).

Next, for work which can be partitioned between multiple people, I find it is not always a simple math problem of size forecast / # people = duration forecast.  Instead there is effort impact to split the work, communicate, coordinate, etc.  Please consider this for any automation calculations you use.

Back to your question...

When you have the sizing forecast, capacity of team members, number of team members, and starting date, the built-in date and math functions for automation can help to calculate what you ask:

https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/jira-smart-values-date-and-time/
https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/jira-smart-values-math-expressions/

Kind regards,
Bill