Auto-scheduling issues

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Before you begin, note that auto-scheduling doesn't work for Kanban teams just yet. See Future releases and limitations for more details.


Previously, you'd need to use the calculate functionality to interact with the timeline itself. When you do this, Portfolio for Jira would calculate the scheduled start and end dates of the issues, and then create a realistic schedule of these issues. There wouldn't be any visual indicators of what these calculated changes are, and the changes themselves would be directly implemented in the plan.

In the new experience, you can choose to:

  • manually schedule work, by dragging and dropping schedule bars in the timeline
  • automatically schedule work, by letting Portfolio for Jira schedule your work automatically, based on known issue details. The auto-scheduled changes will be displayed in purple stripes as a preview. You can choose whether or not to accept these changes — and if accepted, the changes will then be implemented in your plan.

Note that when you're planning work in the new experience, you can do both manual planning and auto-scheduled planning — it's not meant to be one method or the other. For example, during the early, high-level planning stages, you can start by manually creating and scheduling issues in your timeline. Later on, when your teams start adding more accurate dates and estimates to their work in Jira, you can then auto-schedule your plan, to see if your high-level dates make sense.

When auto-scheduling the issues in a plan, Portfolio for Jira considers several factors to come up with the ideal schedule — these factors include issue ranking, team velocity, dependencies, and more.

Sample plan, with issues not yet auto-scheduled

Configuring the auto-scheduling settings

You can further configure the auto-scheduling settings, by choosing:

  • which fields (from sprints, releases, and teams) can be overwritten with auto-scheduled values,
  • and how these fields will be overwritten with the auto-scheduled values, i.e. only empty fields or all fields will be overwritten.

Sample auto-schedule settings in the new experience

In the example above, when you're auto-scheduling your plan, you're allowing the auto-scheduler to overwrite the values for the sprints and releases of the issues all the time. However, the auto-scheduler can overwrite the values for teams only issues that have no teams specified for them.

Once you've configured your auto-schedule settings, you can then preview the changes being suggested by clicking Preview results.

Auto-scheduling a plan

  1. Above the timeline section of your plan, click Auto-schedule.

  2. Configure the auto-schedule settings as needed.
  3. Click Preview results. This will display a preview of the auto-scheduled changes that Portfolio for Jira is suggesting for your plan.

    Sample plan, with auto-scheduled issues being displayed in a preview

    Note that in the timeline section, the schedule bars of the auto-scheduled items will appear in purple stripes. Similarly, in the fields section, the corresponding issue details will also appear in purple stripes, of a lighter shade.

  4. Review the auto-scheduled changes more closely by hovering on each change, to see the current value saved in Portfolio, and the new value that will be saved in both Portfolio and Jira, if the changes are accepted.

    Comparing current values and new values

    In the example above, three (3) values will be auto-scheduled for the issue — target start date, release, and sprint. If you accept the changes, the new values will be updated in your plan.
  5. Perform one of the following actions:
    • To save the changes in your plan, click Accept changes. Note that these changes are just saved in your plan, and are not yet saved in Jira. See Saving changes in Jira to know more.
    • To discard the changes, click Cancel. The changes will not be saved in the plan, nor saved in Jira.
Last modified on Apr 4, 2019

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