5. New Experience Auto-Schedule

“Auto-schedule” in the New Experience calculates Target start and Target end differently than the old “Set target dates from calculated” in the old experience. The new “Auto-schedule” uses team capacity (# of hours) and team size (count of members) whereas the old “Set target dates from calculated” uses individual assignee (Team Member) weekly availability. The new “Auto-schedule” schedules multiple tasks in parallel based on the team capacity (# of hours) and team size (count of members) whereas the old “Set target dates from calculated” schedules tasks sequentially based on the assignee’s availability.

I plan to continue using the old “Set target dates from calculated” because it is more individually precise until Atlassian creates the same functionality in the new “Auto-schedule”.

Auto-schedule automatically calculates and updates Target Start and Target End dates based on team capacity (# of hours) and team size (count of members), Estimate (h) (Original Estimate minus hours logged), and the order of the tasks in the backlog/list (Rank). Since it calculates using Rank, I recommend ordering your backlog by Due date – this may be an automatic setting with Jira in the future so you may not have to do this manually. You will also want to periodically Auto-schedule to calculate Target Start and Target End to get accurate projected end dates and Gantts. Auto-schedule currently re-calculates everything even if you only select certain Projects/Epics/Issues on the left. Also, it will assign a Sprint (if there is an inactive one in the plan), Release, and Team if those fields are blank.

Remember you can always go back to the “Old Experience” in Configure > Planning interface and use “Set target dates from calculated” while you get used the new “Auto-schedule”.

“Auto-schedule” gives you an extra step to 2. “Preview results” after it recalculates…

…and then you preview the results (indicated in purple stripes below) before saving them 3. “Accept changes” (or Cancel)…

…to Portfolio 4. “Review changes” where there is one more opportunity to 5. “Save selected changes in Jira” (or Cancel)