Why are some fields shaded blue in JIRA Portfolio?

[Daniel Brownfield]

JIRA Portfolio shades some fields blue and others are just white.  It looks like the blue fields are what Portfolio thinks the field should be, but I have no way of knowing this and there is no documentation.  The problem is that these blue fields are sometimes calculated incorrectly, and so we will have the wrong team assigned to a series of stories in portfolio even though the board shows differently.  

[shafqat]

In the scope table, a white cell background indicates that the value was set by a user. Whereas a blue background means the scheduling algorithm calculated the value for that field.

For example, if you set a team on a story, the team cell will turn white. The scheduling algorithm will not change this value when calculating the schedule. However, if you set the team on the story to "Calculate", the cell will turn blue. If you then calculate your plan, the scheduling algorithm will choose the most suitable team for that issue. If you change other parts of your plan and calculate, Portfolio may find a more suitable team for that story. Because these calculated values can change at any time, their current value is not stored back in JIRA. If you wish to lock down a story to that team, you can set the team to a specific value instead of "Calculate".

In short, white background values are set by the user, persisted in JIRA, and aren't changed by the scheduling algorithm. Whereas blue values are calculated by the scheduling algorithm, are not persisted in JIRA and may change over time.

[Frederic Baud]

Hi @shafqat, your reply is quite complete. I just have another question for you on the same topic.

I am trialing Portfolio. I am at the stage where my releases are OK (nothing in red), yet under the scope section, I am still getting blue shaded fields and also Warnings about "sprint capacity exceeded". Are the objects (release - scope) independent ?

At the moment and for my trial, 1 sprint = 1 release, so I was expected the release to turn red if the scope is blue-shaded through the algorithm calculation.

What do you think?

Cheers, Fred

[Karine Manoukian]

Does anybody know what orange exclamation mark in triangle symbol on the Scope tab of Portfolio means?

[shafqat]

@Karine Manoukian 

Could you describe where this exclamation mark is showing? You can also try hovering over the exclamation mark and see if you get a tooltip saying why it's there.

The exclamation mark can sometimes show if 2 people are editing the plan at the same time, and so we show a warning to refresh the page.