Improve Automatic Story Point Distribution Across Sprints in Advanced Roadmaps

[Sander van Laarhoven]

Title:
Improve Automatic Story Point Distribution Across Sprints in Advanced Roadmaps

Description:
When planning capacity in Advanced Roadmaps, I assign story points to epics and set start and due dates. Currently, the automatic distribution of story points across sprints within this period tends to front-load the points into the earliest sprints, even if those sprints are already at or over capacity. This results in overloaded early sprints and underutilized later sprints, making the plan less realistic and requiring manual adjustments.

Suggested Improvement:
Enhance the auto-scheduling algorithm so that story points are distributed more evenly across all sprints within the epic’s date range, taking into account each sprint’s remaining capacity. Ideally, the system should fill sprints up to their capacity before allocating work to the next sprint, ensuring a balanced workload and more accurate capacity planning.

Use Case:
This improvement would help teams plan more effectively, avoid overloading early sprints, and reduce the need for manual redistribution of work. It would also make the capacity planning feature more intuitive and valuable for teams managing multiple sprints and large epics.

Benefits:

• More realistic sprint plans

• Better utilization of team capacity

• Reduced manual adjustments

• Improved planning accuracy

[Marc - Devoteam]

Hi @Sander van Laarhoven 

Atlassians product and philosophy follow the usage of Story Points on work items on the Story level, not on the Epic level.

As items on Story level are granted an Epic as a parten and if this Epic has multiple children, and these children are assigned to multiple sprints, the Story Point set on the Epic will be set to that sprint.

Thats way estimation should not be done on an Epic level.

Via automation a rollup of all story points set on the children of the Epic could be done, based on custom number field to be set on an Epic and place the output of the calculation of the sum of the story points in this field.