Issue Summary

Loading a plan fails and the placeholder roadmap displays indefinitely.

The error message and stack-trace suggest that Priority Scheme records in the Jira database may have become invalid.

Background

Jira introduced the concept of Priority Schemes in Jira 7.6. In addition to the default scheme, administrators can now create their own schemes with different priorities, relative order and/or default priority. By default, a Project is associated with the default Priority Scheme. A custom Priority Scheme can be associated with a Project by an administrator. A Project should always have a Priority Scheme, either a custom scheme of the default. You can find more information in the Jira product documentation.

In Portfolio 3.4, we added support for the Priority field in the roadmap. This allowed plan users to view/update an issue's Priority from the roadmap. In order to support this, Portfolio loads from Jira the Priority Scheme for each Project in the Plan. It does this so that it can correctly indicate which Priorities are available for an issue and their relative order.

Versions Affected

The issue has been observed by customers on 3.13 and 3.14. It has been replicated internally on 3.16. It is expected that all versions from between 3.4 and 3.16 inclusive are affected by this issue (as 3.4 was when loading Priority Schemes was added, and 3.17 was when mitigation for this issue was added).

Steps to Reproduce

The steps to reproduce are unknown at this time. We are raising this ticket to help us gather information about the cause.

It is possible, but not confirmed, that changing a Project's Priority Scheme may be the cause.

Expected Results

A Portfolio Plan loads as expected.

Actual Results

A Portfolio Plan fails to load and roadmap displays the placeholder screen indefinitely.

The browser's Javascript console reports the following error:

uncaught at ve at ve 
 at he 
 TypeError: Cannot read property 'baselineStartField' of undefined
    at https://<customer site>/s/d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e-CDN/-4bhhew/79002/b71a231329253f5fa6e75e990ad9af8a/<Portfolio Version>/_/download/batch/com.atlassian.jpo:jpo-wr-page-simple-plans-scripts/com.atlassian.jpo:jpo-wr-page-simple-plans-scripts.js:3:495735

The following exception is logged in the atlassian-jira.log file:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException
        at com.atlassian.rm.common.bridges.jira.issue.priority.IssuePrioritySchemeServiceBridge76.getIssuePriorityScheme(IssuePrioritySchemeServiceBridge76.java:48)
        at com.atlassian.rm.jpo.env.issuepriority.JiraIssuePriorityService.getIssuePriorityScheme(JiraIssuePriorityService.java:61)
        at com.atlassian.rm.jpo.env.issuepriority.JiraIssuePriorityService.getIssuePriorityInformation(JiraIssuePriorityService:50)
        at com.atlassian.rm.jpo.rest.service.plan.CommonPlanInformationProvider.getIssuePriorityInformation(CommonPlanInformationProvider.java:340)
        at com.atlassian.rm.jpo.rest.service.plan.CommonPlanInformationProvider.getPlanInfo(CommonPlanInformationProvider.java:161)
        at com.atlassian.rm.jpo.plugin.views.simpleplans.data.SimplePlansInformationProvider.getData(SimplePlansInformationProvider.java:88)
        at com.atlassian.rm.jpo.plugin.views.simpleplans.data.SimplePlansInformationProvider.getData(SimplePlansInformationProvider.java:26)
...

A review of the stack trace and the corresponding code indicates that no Priority Scheme could be found for a Project. Given that a Project should always have a Priority Scheme this suggests the corresponding database records have become invalid.

Workaround

1. Portfolio 3.17 introduces a check for a missing Priority Scheme for a Project and fails gracefully when this occurs. The permits the Plan to load. However issues in the affected Project will have an empty list of Priorities for this field (see attached screen shot: Degraded-Priority-Behaviour.png). So Portfolio behaviour is still degraded but much less so. If you are affected by this issue and in a position to upgrade, we recommend you do so.

2. For at least one customer, associating a new Priority Scheme with the affected Project(s) in the Plan resolved the issue. This is done configured through the Jira Administration menu, via Issues -> Priority Schemes.