Advanced Roadmaps: Unestimated items and role-DOWN in new user interface / future plans

[Matthias Kannenberg]

Hi,

I am using Portfolio/Advanced Roadmaps for years now with different clients and am generally pretty happy with it, until the new planning interface arrived. To this day it lacks various features which are essential for me and I would like to understand if they are coming or what the plans are.

Unestimated items: Being able to make a plan with unestimated items getting a default value is critical for us since it really helps both for long term planning / perspective and also helps with short-term / disruptive changes and their effects which we can discuss with our clients. So far this is entirely missing from the new user-interface, or am I missing something?

Role-Down of field: When I change the Release of a Story or an Epic, I would like that change to role-down to all child issues. For us this is a fast and easy way to move groups of issues to different releases and exactly what is missing from Standard Jira. How it worked in the old user interface was absolutely perfect but it seems there is currently not an option to do so in the new UI?

Person-based capacity: Maybe I'm just missing this because I think I have seen this in the new user interface as well, but are person-based capacity overview gone now? This was the single most useful thing for our Sprint planning to avoid bottlenecks and overcommitting single team members with unique skills / experiences.

So far I just stuck to the old interface for all the teams I'm supervising but we have a prospective new client with an enterprise license (so basically unlimited users) where plugin recommendations mean a lot of money and I would not want to recommend a plugin where they should use an outdated view and all useful features might go away at some point in the future.

Oh yeah, and if this makes any difference: This is all Jira Server installations since Cloud is not an option (GDPR, NDAs etc..), so no next-gen projects..

[Earl McCutcheon]

Hello @Matthias Kannenberg ,

Thanks for reaching out, and initally some of these points are discussed in the "Changes in the improved interface" documentation particularly the Capacity portion:

Managing capacity

Previously, you'd be able to plan the individual capacity of your team members.

In the improved interface, individual capacity planning is replaced by team capacity planning. When auto-scheduling a plan, the total capacity of a team to complete the work being scheduled will be taken into account. To do this, you must directly set team capacity in your plan.

And the option to do individual capacity planning was brought up in the following feature request noting that it is currently flagged as "not being considered" with the following comment discussing why from the team:

• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JPOSERVER-2562

Roi Fine added a comment - 17/Nov/2019 6:51 PM

Hi team,

Firstly, thanks for your feedback. We noted your feature suggestion.

The approach for capacity planning in the new UI is more lightweight.

We are constantly building more features in this area. But are our main focus at the moment is to build more features around the team capacity and/or ** velocity, rather than individuals'.  

Portfolio's mission is to be the "team of teams" agile planning tool. To drive that first, we need to surface teams' velocities and allow effective what-if scenario planning based on those.

If that approach doesn't work, I'd love to hear why, and remind you that you can always switch to the old interface.

I hope the above makes sense.

Roi | Product Manager

Next Scheduling unestimated issues is done in the "Auto Scheduler" , noting in the improved interface:

By default, the scheduler uses target dates to schedule unestimated issues, and the issues will be scheduled to last the duration of their target dates. You can choose to use custom dates instead of target dates. See Scheduling to learn more.

For unestimated issues that are assigned to any sprint, release, or team, the values for these will persist regardless of the auto-scheduled settings that you've configured.

For the roll down values the action is reversed in in the new interface and rather the valuse are rolled up to the parent issue , as the parent issue can have issues spanning multiple releases sprints or due dates the values are now set on the child issue and can be rolled up into the parent.

Regards,
Earl