How to resolve under-utilized / empty sprints in portfolio automatic planning

[Ran Zaksh]

Hi,

I have built my company roadmap into portfolio.

It is quite complex with several initiatives and epics. I have manually allocated teams to the various epics (for simplicity we defined only one stage - implementation, and one skill - development).

I have also defined a few versions with dynamic end dates, allocating each epic to a version.

Some dependencies are defined but a lot of the epics are not dependent on anything.

The problem I see is that at least one of the teams has gaps / empty sprints in the middle of their workplan, while the epics that populate the plan after the gaps could have started earlier (no dependencies). These epics belong to release 3 (meaning there are two releases beforehand) but I do expect the team to start working on them as soon as they are available, even if other teams are still working on release 1 or 2.

Even if I set the release 3 (and release 2) start date manually to today, this problem persists.

How can I resolve this?

Thanks

Ran

[Martin Suntinger · Accepted solution]

Hi Ran, I've investigated this, and based on your description it is certainly expected that the epic in release 3 is scheduled as soon as a team is free to do it, given the release date is set as a fixed date allowing for an overlap between the releases. 

It seems this was a scheduling bug related to dynamic release dates (the behaviour is not reproducable with fixed end dates). 

We've released 1.8.2 just now containing a fix for this - could you verify if this resolves the issue? Big thanks for uncovering this! 

Martin Suntinger, Product Manager for JIRA Portfolio

[Fernando Taliberti]

Hi, I seem to be having the same problem. My plan is using only 36% of the team capacity and it is full of Gaps (empty sprints). The plan rolls out to 2018!

Can you help?

Thank you!

[Ran Zaksh]

Thanks, this indeed resolve the issue. Sorry for the late reply.

Ran