Upcoming: Unified, More Powerful Timeline for Jira Software Spaces

[#1]

We’re excited to announce a major upgrade to the Jira Software project timeline. Soon, you’ll experience a better timeline that designed to help software teams plan, track, and deliver work with greater clarity and speed.

When? We will roll this out starting in July month.

What’s changing?

✅ Display all levels including subtasks and work items without epic

The timeline now shows all work items, even if they aren’t linked to an epic, so nothing gets missed. Subtasks now appear as individual items, making it easier to track progress and update them directly Work items are no longer limited to the epic level; you can now see items above that level.

✅ Enhanced filtering (Sorting and Grouping are coming soon!)

Filter and group work items by more fields to quickly find what matters and organise your timeline your way. Sorting currently supports specific work item fields(key, summary, assignee and status); we will add more soon.

✅ Display duration bar according to status or custom colour

Choose to display work items by status color or custom color (from epic level) for better visual organization. 

✅ Bulk update more work item fields

You can now bulk update more fields, not just dates, for multiple work items at once.

Note: Schedule by X days bulk edit is no longer available. You can bulk move the children work items by dragging the parent timeline bar.

🔄 [Changed] Hierarchy displays as a flyout modal when filter is active

The modal shows relationships between the matched parent item (and its grandparent) and their immediate children when filter. If your space has a board-level filter (accessible to Admins only), the flyout filter will appear by default. 

Why? Your filtered results will continue to respect your filter — only matching items appear in the table. To see an item's parent or children (which may not match your filter), you'll open the flyout rather than seeing them inline in the table. This keeps your filtered view clean while giving you quick access to context when you need it.

         

Other changes including:

• Move timeline settings from space level to view level: Timeline settings are now easier to access and customize in context. 

• Enhanced smart link embedding capabilities: The Jira timeline now stays editable even after pasting content from outside of Jira.

• 'Show completed item' has been replaced with 'Hide done item': This update mirrors other Jira views (List and Board), giving users the option to hide done tasks and streamline their timeline view

• Expand/Collapse parent work items is now moved to the work column header 

What’s next? 

Drop your thoughts below or reach out directly – your input shapes what we build next!

This is a step toward simplifying Jira and making it work better for you, your team, and your workflow. We’re excited about where this is heading, and as always, we’d love your feedback.  

Thanks for being part of the journey,
The Jira Cloud team

[Yatish Madhav]

This is great. Looking forward to it - thanks @Amy Cheong  and Atlassian!

[Tomislav Tobijas]

I've been using Timeline view more and more on one instance since it's on the Standard plan. Being missing the view of all child items (incl. Sub-tasks) within Epic, so this is a really nice addition 🙂

[Christian Happel]

I'm not happy. See my feedback here: Timeline view in Jira spaces has changed over the ...

[Peter Notenbaert]

I use the project Timeline to plan my team's epics on a daily basis. It only showed epics, and I could drill down to story level.

We used 'Plans' separately to view higher level item types like 'Roadmap' and 'Initiative' levels across multiple teams (Jira Projects).

Now I seem to have lost the pure Epic view at the Jira Project level, and have to start from Initiative level instead. This has completely messed up my view:

• It starts at Initiative level, which is cross-team, so the items are not necessarily in the same order as the epics at Jira project level. I have to expand all initiatives to find what I need.
• The moment I apply a filter, it switches to a flat view. I can't say I like this, because I lose the overview of how the shown items were organised into epics.

In essence, this view has become useless for me, and I'll have to change the way I organize my work completely.

What I don't understand is why such a big rework isn't deployed gradually, with some warning, and with at least a couple of weeks to opt out.

[Wilf ILIFFE]

We work in Epics so the loss of this level in the hierarchy makes the Timeline view useless.   This appears to be Jira trying to force us to use the tool in a way that they want, not what the user-base wants.

Thanks for nothing.

[Ben Souchet]

To me, the removal of grouping by EPIC seems like a bug rather than a change in functionality, so I opened a support ticket because it's indicated Sorting and Grouping are coming soon! but last week this worked fine.

[Peter Notenbaert]

Other remarks on this new TimeLine:

• Filter is a dropdown with a huge list of possible filters. Hard to find the correct filter, and inconsistent with filters in other places in Jira where you can search for a filter
• On tab in the browser it just shows 'Jira' instead of the 'Timeline - Project' or something like that. Also incinsistent.

It seems to me this is work in progress and to early to have been put into production.

PS. The new time line could become more or less useful again, if a user could define the hierarchy, from - to, like it can be done in Jira Plans

[joshua_k_twumasi]

The recent changes to Timeline have made it significantly less usable for our team.

Overnight, we’ve lost key capabilities such as filtering and grouping by Epic, which are fundamental to how we plan and track work. As a result, the Timeline view is now far less effective and difficult to navigate.

This is particularly concerning given the timing. We are about to begin Product Increment planning for Q3, and these changes have introduced friction at a critical moment.

Could you clarify:

• Whether this change is intentional or a temporary regression
• If there is a way to restore the previous functionality (e.g., via settings or feature flags)
• Whether a rollback or fix is planned in the near term

We rely heavily on Timeline for planning, and this change has had an immediate impact on our workflows.

[Maggie Takeichi]

The recent update to the Timeline view has significantly impacted our planning workflow. The ability to view issues by their assigned sprint within the Timeline was a key feature for our teams and was essential for planning upcoming work. We would like to know if this functionality can be restored or if there is a planned replacement for it. We are not using Advanced Roadmaps, nor do we intend to adopt it for a single project simply to regain functionality that was previously available in the standard Timeline view.

Previously, the Timeline view displayed:

• Open Epics with their child issues organized underneath with the assigned sprint for each issue, allowing us to easily visualize upcoming work and sprint planning.

After the change:

• Sprint assignments are no longer displayed.
• The available filtering is limited to "Completed" or "Incomplete," which results in an overwhelming number of issues being displayed and makes the Timeline difficult to use for planning.
• There are no Timeline settings available to restore the previous sprint-based view.

We have been unable to find a configuration option or workaround to restore the previous functionality.

[Melissa Bethancourt]

Timelines have gone from one of my most-used planning features to being effectively unusable overnight.

Sorting and grouping are fundamental timeline capabilities, not nice-to-have follow-up features. Previously, I could see all of my epics in one place, expand them to view child stories and tasks, and quickly understand scope, sequencing, and ownership. That made planning clear and efficient.

The new layout removes that workflow and replaces it with something much harder to navigate. In its current state, this is not an improvement. It has significantly degraded a core planning experience.

Please restore the ability to group and sort epics, and to expand epics inline to see their child issues. Without those basics, the timeline view is not fit for practical planning.

[Bronwyn Robins]

We have multiple teams using one project and used the timeline view to rank our epics in order of delivering them.  The team filters no longer work in the timeline view, so it now offers me all other teams' tickets as well as my teams which makes this view unusable. Sure, make the changes so people have the choice but don't remove the ability for people to do things the way that works for them and their project. Please look at this with some urgency.

[Marko Cipovic]

@Amy Cheong is it possible to add Epic feature as option on Timeline? Our teams heavily rely on this feature and planning. Thanks!

[Álvaro Jiménez]

This update is a serious regression, not an improvement. You shipped a "more powerful" Timeline that is less powerful for the one thing most of us actually used it for: planning at the epic level. Concretely, what you broke:

 - Epic-only grouping is gone. I could collapse to epics and expand to see their children. Now everything is dumped into a single flat list of every work item — that's information overload, not planning.
- No hierarchy-level control. I can't choose to show only epics, or only one level. It shows everything, always.

 - Filtering nukes the hierarchy. The moment I apply any filter, the view collapses to flat and I lose all grouping — so I can't even filter down to recent work and keep structure.
- Net result: I can no longer see my child issues' status and assignee in a focused, grouped view. The board went from a daily planning tool to unusable overnight.

"Sorting and Grouping are coming soon" is not acceptable as a post-hoc note. You removed working, daily-used functionality from production with no opt-out and no migration path, and shipped the replacement incomplete. This should have been opt-in behind a toggle until feature parity was reached.

Please: (1) give us a way to revert to the previous Timeline until parity is restored, and (2) commit to a concrete date for epic grouping, hierarchy-level selection, and filter-preserving grouping. A vague "soon" leaves teams broken in the meantime.

[Francesco Riglietti]

There is no way to see the last closed epic and the status of completation of an epic.

But the most important thing is not being prepared to the change and have a way to get back to the old version. This is a sign of a company that does not listen to their customers and is really disturbing.

[Daniel Costa]

Some of what is included in this update is great, such as bulk action support in the timeline and better representation of child tasks. Other components of this completely undermine agile principles and likely common business practice for workload management.

The ability to see child tasks on the timeline was much needed, but at the cost of losing the spacial relationship entirely was not worth it. The second we filter by anything the child tasks are no longer visually near their parent tasks at all. In order to hunt down the child tasks related to the parent, or vice versa, we now have several additional clicks using the flyout button adding time to every action or assessment. At least keep the children grouped after their parent task when the list gets flattened instead of the seemingly random order it breaks into. Maybe the "coming soon" grouping feature will help with this, but with no ETA we've been effectively hamstrung, and I struggle to see what this does that a JQL list couldn't have done for us short of the gantt chart visual. The post even says the "coming soon" feature will allow us to "quickly find what matters and organise your timeline", so without this feature its self admitted that its an unorganised list that takes a non-agile amount of time to find what matters. Why launch it without this feature knowing that?

The condensed filters would've been fine in theory, but in a team-managed space I now have to sift/search through hundreds or thousands of assignees, statuses, types, parents, etc. to find the few actually relevant to the team-managed space I'm working in at the time. Sure searching only takes a few seconds, but when you're doing it many times a day, everyday of the week, that adds up and doesn't sound very agile. Why would I want work types and statuses not in my team-managed space workflow to even show up in the filter? Perhaps a robust company managed approach would alleviate this, but I can't imagine thats the common model given the advantage of letting teams manage their own space. If a rollback on this is too much, give Team-managed space admins the ability to remove erroneous filtering options, or limit it to relevant ones (IE ones present in the workspace) for non-admin members.

Color code by status is neat and more bulk edit support is great, no notes there, happy with that.

The changes in theory could be good, but at best this was deployed unfinished. At worst, loads of companies and their teams will have to completely restructure their work management to account for this or stop using the timeline view all together.