Can I add milestones to kanban stories, or at least get subtasks to show on the kanban timeline?

[Matt Meeks]

I manage a small team of UX designers, and we've been tasked with improving our process and the visibility into the process. I want to be able to add multiple milestones for each issue on our kanban board. For example, UX review, PM review, Final review, and have those milestones show up on either the timeline or calendar view. It would be very clumsy and inelegant, but I'd be willing to create subtasks with dates if that were the only solution. However, Jira does not allow subtasks on either the timeline or calendar views for some reason. Is there a workaround or another method to be able to show due dates? It's also really frustrating that I can't create events to indicate PTO for team members or other types of events that impact availability.

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Matt Meeks 

Can you tell us the type of Space this concerns? Click the ... button next to the Space name in the navigation panel on the left and tell us what the last two lines in the pop up say. I will be something like 

Software space
Company-managed

The tags on your post indicate you are using the Standard subscription. Is that correct? That would mean you would be using the Timeline and Calendar views that show up as tabs alongside your Board and All Work tabs like this:

For the basic Timeline feature in that case it is not currently supported to add "milestones". There is a change request about that here:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-91595

And currently it is not supported to show Subtasks on the basic Timeline. There is a change request about that also:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-91572

For the Calendar feature subtasks will display if you assign a value to the "Due date" field. However, within the Calendar view you will not see any information about the subtask's parent. You would have to click on the subtask and drill upwards to get information about the parent item.

[Trudy Claspill]

In a Premium plan you could use the Plans feature for your timeline. In that case Subtasks can be shown on the timeline. And you can add custom field columns to the display so if you had custom date fields for your milestones you could show those. They would not show in the bars of the tasks, as you can select only one date field to use as the start for the bar and one date field to use as the end for the bar. Additional dates can be displayed next to the tasks, like I have here with Start and End dates.

The Timeline in a Plan can also show subtask issue types.

[Trudy Claspill]

Also, I'd really like to see sub tasks on the timeline view. Actually, I'd prefer to add timelines to the parent story and not have subtasks at all, but Jira kanban in general has very limited capability for actually managing work.

Unfortunately the basic Timeline feature is limited.

1. It cannot show Subtasks.
2. It will only show Epics and their children.
3. It will not show a child item (Story) that has no parent (Epic). This is described in the documentation here:

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/set-up-the-roadmap/

And the full range of documentation on the basic Timeline feature is here:

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/create-manage-and-visualize-work-on-the-timeline/

Are you using Epics in your Space?

You can learn more about the Calendar view here.

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/what-is-the-calendar/

[Matt Meeks]

Yes, we're using Epics, but we're using them as buckets for each of our applications to hold the stories for that product. I thought about changing to using epics as the story for the design and stories as the milestone, but we really need the epics to organize our stories. Unfortunately it sounds like my only option is to continue to have to track everything in two separate spreadsheets plus the kanban board. I really don't understand how some of this very basic management functionality isn't part of Jira.

[Trudy Claspill]

Are you willing to consider adding a Marketplace app to your environment to solve the problem? I don't have specific one in mind, but there might be one that would work.

Or you can consider upgrading to Premium to get access to displaying additional date fields as I mentioned prey.

I also found some other articles/post that might give you additional ideas:

https://community.atlassian.com/forums/App-Central-articles/Every-Way-You-Can-Create-and-Track-Milestones-in-Jira/ba-p/3000423

https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Jira-Cloud-Admins-discussions/How-do-you-work-with-milestones/td-p/1903822

https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Jira-Align-questions/Is-there-a-plan-to-provide-a-better-method-of-reporting/qaq-p/2947729

[Matt Meeks]

I'd love to consider adding a Marketplace app and/or upgrading to Premium but my company won't consider those options. Thanks for the links-I'll have a look and see if there's a workaround that works for us.

[Matt Meeks]

Also, I'd really like to see sub tasks on the timeline view. Actually, I'd prefer to add timelines to the parent story and not have subtasks at all, but Jira kanban in general has very limited capability for actually managing work.

[Matt Meeks]

It says:

Software space

Team-managed

I can get sub-tasks to show up on the calendar view with dates, but they aren't displayed as children of the story. It's very frustrating.

[Trudy Claspill]

Yes, that is consistent with my original reply.

[Matt Meeks]

Also, I've gone into the timeline settings for the board and enabled child work item scheduling, but subtasks do not show up on the timeline or calendar views.