Scheduling behavior

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The automatic scheduling mechanism is one of the core capabilities of Portfolio for JIRA. It computes an optimized, realistic resource allocation and with that, forecasts release dates, resource utilization and bottlenecks taking into consideration the following aspects:

    •  Backlog items' priority
    •  Sequence - Start and end releases' dates
    •  Estimates and required skill level capacities
    •  Teams and people's availability
    •  People's skills - what type of work can each member do.
    •  Varying availability and absences. For example, vacations, people available only from certain.
    •  Dependencies between backlog items
    •  Work's stages - activities that can happen either in parallel or sequential activities.
    •  Team's schedules - iterations and sprint lengths, or continuous, day-to-day schedule.
    •  Configurable constraints for example, how many people can work in parallel on a story.

Automatic release assignment

Automatic release assignment only works if there is at least one release defined with a fixed end date.

In this case, backlog items with release assignment set to "Calculate" will be put into the release(s) automatically based on their priority rank. 

The scheduling algorithm currently optimizes the scheduling of highest priority items first. Even if there might be a scenario where the team could fit in a bit more capacity into a release if it started with a lower priority item, Portfolio for JIRA will not suggest this in the schedule. Items that have the highest priority should also be started first. Also, you might want to prioritize items with the highest risk first to tackle uncertainty early in the process.

Calculated and static assignments

The following fields can either be assigned statically, or suggested automatically by the scheduling algorithm: 

  • Release - manual: "item should be shipped with release X"; automatic: "into which release does the item fit?".
  • Team - manual: "this story should be implemented by team A"; automatic: "based on skills and capacities, which team can deliver this best?"
  • Members - manual: "Peter and/or Sarah should work on this"; automatic: "based on their skills and availability, it would be best if X, Y and Z work on this story".

If you set a field to 'Calculate' in the drop-down menu, a value is assigned automatically upon the next recalculation, and the field gets a blue background.

Planning horizon

Portfolio for JIRA has a planning horizon of 5 years by default. If you believe that your schedule isn't being displayed properly and your estimates are for less than 5 years, please check your team's capabilities and estimates. If you require a longer planning horizon, up to 30 years, please contact Atlassian Support.


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Last modified on Nov 23, 2017

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