Scheduling unestimated items based on default estimates

Default estimates help you to see your unestimated issues in the schedule without having to add estimates to all of them individually. For every hierarchy level that you configure in Portfolio, you can define a default estimate that is set in the plan's planning unit. The units can be story points, days or hours. These estimates are Portfolio-only, and will not appear in Jira or affect your team work.

Before you begin:

• When you import issues that are mapped to the defined hierarchical levels, those issues take the configured default estimate unless, there is already a defined estimate.
• Default estimates apply only to unestimated issues in your plan.
• When switching the planning unit from story points to time-based the default estimate will be switched.
• If there is a parent with children, and one child has an estimate, the parent won't get default estimate because it will take the child aggregated estimates and therefore, it is not considered unestimated.
• If the children have no estimate, the parent will receive the default estimate.

Follow these steps to define a default estimate per hierarchy level:

1. Go to  > Scheduling > Unestimated item scheduling.
2. Check Base on default estimates.
   Now, the default estimate options will become visible for each hierarchy level.
   
   

3. Add the estimates that will be set as default per hierarchy level.

   Note:

   If you select Off, unestimated items won't impact the schedule and may not appear on the schedule.

Example

                 As you can see in the following screenshot, we have a plan with several unestimated items.

1. We follow the steps above and go to  > Scheduling.
2. Under Unestimated item scheduling, we check Base on default estimates.
   
   
   
   Now, the default estimate options will become visible for each hierarchy level. The default estimate values are displayed in light grey and the actual estimates are displayed in dark grey as you can see in the example below under the Story Points column.