Jira Plan (aka Adv. Roadmap) auto-schedule did not assign tickets to sprints

[Lui Chan]

Hi: 

  We are running Jira v9.4 datacenter version and had a problem with auto-schedule in Jira Plan (aka Advanced Roadmap).  Here are some background info:

1. We started with Jira only (No Jira Plan/Advanced Roadmap) a few years back
2. We use Scrum board for all our tickets.  We manually created sprints (length is 2 weeks) and assign tickets from backlog to them manually
3. Later our company purchased Jira Plan feature and my team decided to give it a try.
4. We use the existing scrum board as source for Jira plan.  We can see all the manually created sprints in the plan and confirmed the "Target start" and "Target end" dates match the sprint start/end date.
5. We created several "Team" for the plan and assigned velocity and sprint length (2 weeks) to them
6. We assigned story points, "Team" and Fix version/s to all tickets
7. We observed warning that in current plan (from manually created sprints), some tickets started before the tickets it depends on are finished (Say ticket A blocked ticket B but B was mistakenly assiged to an earlier sprint than ticket A due to human errors)
8. So we ran auto-schedule expecting it to fix the error (i.e., assigning ticket A to an earlier sprint than ticket B)
9. But there is no change in sprint assignment, and warning remains.
10. We then created some new tickets, assign Team and fixed version/s for them.  Run auto schedule and expect them to be assigned sprints, but they were not assigned to any sprints.  It seems although Jira Plan can see all the manually created sprints, its auto schedule will not assign tickets to them.

Could anyone help?

Thanks.

[Mathias Richter]

Hi @Lui Chan 

there are two things that you could check: 

1. Did you also add estimates to the issues? The auto-scheduler only works if estimates are available (and the estimates need to be added to the correct field representing e.g. Story Points if you also defined a Velocity based on Story Points to the team)
2. Did you check if the auto-scheduler settings were made correctly to assign new Sprints to either all issues or just the ones without a current Sprint assignment? (See: Configure your Advanced Roadmaps plan settings | Jira Software Support)

If you cannot find a solution, you can also open a Ticket with Atlassian Support, as a valid Jira Data Center license also entitles you to use Atlassian Priority Support. 

BR - @Mathias Richter 

[Lui Chan]

Hi Mathias:

  Thanks a lot for your quick response.  The anwsers are "Yes" to both of your questions:

1. We assigned story points to all story tickets.
2. I set auto-schedule to ovewrite all sprint value: 

   I will ask our DevOps team to submit a ticket w/ Atlassian support

Thanks.

-Lui

[Mathias Richter]

One additional thought: 

Please also check if the assigned fix versions do not conflict with the sprints that you have planned. If a "fix version" has a different start/end date that does not match your desired sprints, the planning might be off as well.

I just created a test project on my test environment (Jira 9.12 LTS - I don't have 9.4 at hand right now) to confirm that the functionality works in general and sprints were assigned. Therefore I think the support team might be able to help you better as they can get access to information about your environment if you share it with them.

[Lui Chan]

Hi Mathias:

   I did some experiment and it turns out auto-schedule did work (changing target start/end dates) but it did not assign sprint to the auto-scheduled ticket.  Here is what I did:

1. I purposedly empty the manually assigned sprint for ticket HMIFW-7260
2. Then I ran auto-schedule to overwrite "Empty values only" for Sprints, Releaes and Teams
3. I noticed HMIFW-7260 did changed its Target start/end dates (postponing it to 28/Oct/24 ~ 10/Nov/24) but the Sprint value remains empty

   So auto-schedule did work but it did not assiging sprint.  Is this caused by us manually creating sprints in the board?  Can auto-schedule put the re-scheduled ticket into an existing manually created sprint (and create it automatically if the sprint did not exist)?

  Here is the plan scheduling and source setup: 

Thanks.

-Lui

[Lui Chan]

Also auto-schedule put the HMIFW-7260 to backlog, which at least is consistent with empty sprint value.

[Mathias Richter]

Hi @Lui Chan 

I've tested this a bit and this is the result:

• Only issues with Target Dates within existing sprints are assigned to sprints
• If no sprint exists for at least one day of the target start/end of the issue, the no sprint will be applied

You can see in my screenshot, that issues were only assigned to existing sprints (green box). Other issues only got Target Dates assigned (yellow box). Therefore, my recommendation is to create as many sprints as possible upfront. But also keep in mind that uncertainty increases over time. Assigning issues now (in May) to sprints in November will probably result in a lot of sprints replacing. Therefore, it could make sense to create a rule that x-sprints (e.g., 3 sprints or the next 3 months (PI)) need to be created. The other issues will be planned in time (Target Dates) but not assigned to a sprint (which can be done later). The system will not create any sprints for the users.

What I did not test but might be an issue as well: Parallel sprints could also cause issues! 

[Lui Chan]

Hi Mathias:

  Thanks a lot for the updates, I think now we are getting close to the root cause!

  You said: "If no sprint exists for at least one day of the target start/end of the issue, the no sprint will be applied".  We are using bi-weekly sprints, and it seems the manually created sprints in the boards are out of alignment by a week comparing to assigned target start/end date in the plan.

   In our case, the auto-scheduled target start date for the HMIFW-7260 is Oct 28, 2024.  But our manually created sprint starts at Oct 21, 2024.  I think this is the cause of auto-schedule not assigning sprint.

   Is there a quick way to set Plan to sync target start date?  If not, we will need to change start date of all our manualy created sprints to align with Plan instead. 

Thanks.

-Lui

[Mathias Richter]

No, there is no such functionality.

I propose checking why the plan is one week off instead of adjusting the sprints to what the plan currently assumes. It can happen if sprints have different lengths or maybe you have parallel sprints in the same board that confuse the calculation?

Is the sprint length in the Plan Team equal to the real sprint length? 

[Lui Chan]

Hi Mathias:

  Thanks for the insight.  Turns out one of our teams is having its own sprint.  and that sprint is also 2 week in length but one day off.  So we do have parallel sprints.  I moved all the tickets from their sprint to our sprint, so now there is no parallel sprints (at least of parallel sprints with tickets).  I will ask them to remove the empty sprint tomorrow.

  However the problem remains.  Our board is very old, and it used to have 1 week sprints.  Beginning last year, we switched to 2-week sprints but these old 2-week sprints were indeed 1 week off alignment comparing to our current 2-week sprint.  Will these old but completed sprints confused Jira auto-schedule?  If so, we may have to change start date of our current sprints.

  Otherwise, the real sprint length and team sprint lengh are both 2 weeks:

Real sprint:

Team sprint setting:

Thanks.

-Lui

[Lui Chan]

Hi Mathias:

  Since auto-schedule scheduled the ticket to Oct 28, 2024 to Nov 4, 2024, I change one of the sprints to cover the same date range.  However auto schedule still does not assign the tickt to this sprint.

   So looks like we will need Atlassian support to do some Jira internal debugging.  I really appreciate your insight and quick help to get to this stage.

Thanks.

-Lui

[Mathias Richter]

Thank you for the update! I'm happy I could help a bit further and hope the Support team can help you further!