JIRA Software Team Workload/Capacity Planning

[Kudja]

Hello,

I wanna know how to better organaze work and how JIRA can help me in such situation.

We have small team of 2.5 backend developers (one on half a day) and 1 frontend developer. We have long term support projects (bug fixing / future implementation / bug fixing on our futures) and some channel where we getting some not regular (one time) tasks from new clients (currently we have all of them in one separate project).

Currently we planning just for near 2-3 days (sometimes to 1-3 weeks if task is big). We planning by selecting biggest/most urgent tasks and telling this to responsible developer. Same time we can have backlog for 2 month, but mostly not urgent tasks.

We wanna plan to 3-4 weeks ahead and give to customers realistic Due Dates + such way we can see if someone from team has not enought work on 2-d/3-d/... week. Same time we have some urgent tasks just added and needed to be inserted to plan today (all other tasks must move forward in such case)

I'm sure many peaple has same structure or was before with same structure - may be someone can share expirience how is better to organize work in such case?

First I thought to use something like Tempo planner or Activitytimeline but they looks for me not very good as sometimes our estimates are wrong and sometimes we need to insert something urgetn and in that case we need to move all task by task here - not very good point. Also I wanna see tasks on calendar, but Tempo not allows this as I can see.

So currently I think I can use Sprints for planning. Short sprints like 1 week, as we have a lot of small tasks + we would release all futures same time as they are ready.

But I have some questions here for some situations I can't understand.

So initials if we'll use sprints:

• we have sprints for 1 week long;
• we deploy all once it ready;
• board estimate = Original Time Estimate (JIRA Not allowing to use Remaning in some reason);
• I have configured filter for backlog (like only tasks Ready For Development status + originalEstimate > 1);
• I have fast filters by team members, so I can check added to them capacity on sprint;
• To have some flexibility and knowing reality we planning for 6 or 7 hours per developer as 1-2 hours we need to small urgent fixes and our estimate mistakes.

All good, I can prepare few sprints and this would be plan for few weeks. Inside each sprint we can change priority on tasks + if needed add Due Dates for some of them if needed.

But on thursday we approved a new task, its duration is 2 days, and on friday I want the developer to already work on it, because this is urgent and important task!!!

So this task would take friday in that sprint + monday of next sprint. Let's say this is task like Create new extension, so we don't wanna split him into 2 separate tasks.

What I can do in such situation? 

Yep, I'll move other tasks for one day into next sprint + something from next sprint to one more next... But what I need to do with that new task? As it is 2 days I must include it to current sprint, but in current it would not be done and I need to move it then to next sprint as well. As we can't use Remaning estimate value - on next sprint it would show me 2d capacity instead on 1d remaning.

Can you please explain what is the best way to solve this situation?

One more question - can I somehow auto add this tasks to calendar? (may be to whole week view with ability to correct this more accurate). For me idea to add calendar gadget to dashboard where developer can see planned tasks for each day looking very good, and if he can move tasks from day to next day etc. it's even better, such way he and I can see what on he would work tomorrow. I understand we need to add some custom fields like Start date / End date for this, but how to autoupdate them on adding to sprint or moving between sprints. Or may be this is bad / not needed idea at all?