Simple dependency chain auto-scheduling in Advanced Roadmaps?

[Cory Tsang]

Hi,

I'm new to Jira Cloud and I'm trying to figure out a way to do simple dependency chain auto-scheduling. On Jira Server with Structure.Gantt, just establishing dependency links would auto-schedule tasks in dependency order. I'm guessing part of the problem is that the issue source is a Kanban Board, but the the documentation about auto-scheduling Kanban issues seems to indicate it will just fill up capacity on a per-day basis.  Maybe because it doesn't mention dependencies, it means it doesn't consider it?

I also noticed that the size of the bars don't get adjusted once you put in an estimate.  And, if you have overlapping dates, it doesn't seem to care.

Am I missing something obvious?

Thanks,

Cory

[Dave · Accepted solution]

Hi @Cory Tsang ,

The auto-scheduling should work fine with Kanban. The key thing is to make sure that your issues have estimates (it sounds like they have) and that the relationships you're using between issues are considered a dependency relationships in the Advanced Roadmaps settings (by default the only relationship considered a dependency is the blocks / is blocked by relationship IIRC).

You should also check the team capacity (the weekly hours) and the number of people in the team (as this can impact the auto-scheduling results). It is assumed that a team won't "swarm" on a story level issue (i.e. that only one person will work on an issue at a time) so the weekly hours is distributed across the number of team members.

You should also check the dependency scheduling configuration which can either be concurrent or sequential (it sounds like you're looking for sequential dependency scheduling).

Dependencies are definitely considered by the auto-scheduling algorithm though. I'm not sure what you mean about the size of the bars not getting adjusted? Can you provide some screenshots showing what is happening (ideally showing the estimate field) as well as providing the capacity configuration for the team?

This is an example I just quickly setup to verify:

This shows 4 issues that depend on each other that have been scheduled using the auto-scheduler (it's actually showing the preview of the auto-schedule results prior to accepting them!)

I hope this helps, let me know if you need more info.

Regards,

Dave

[Cory Tsang]

Hi @Dave ,

I was still having a problem when I realized that Sub-tasks in Jira Cloud are really limited in functionality compared to Jira Server.  Changing my issue types to Task from Sub-Task worked, however, this is going to be a pretty big problem since we're migrating somewhere on the order of 500k+ issues in a single project where we use sub-tasks as the base unit of work in cross-functional teams where we use dependency links to facilitate handoffs.  I was previously using Structure.Gantt to auto-schedule my dependency chain so I could then level by resource and be predictive about when we needed to engage specific resource types.

Do you know if it is possible to configure Advanced Roadmaps to schedule based off of sub-task dependency links?  Maybe this is a deeper conversation about our particular use-cases.

Thanks,

Cory

[Dave]

Hi @Cory Tsang ,

Unfortunately I don't believe that it is possible to schedule based off sub-task dependencies. The working assumption is that a sub-task is something that is done as part of the parent task (think in terms of a checklist of things to complete for the task). So it's not really expected that sub-tasks (especially between story level issues) would be interdependent.

This is why you can't change Team assignment (or for Scrum planning, sprint) on a sub-task to make it different from that of it's parent.

Regards,

Dave