Dates in Jira -- what do they mean

[auj012]

Hi Everybody

 I am new to Jira and am trying to understand  more about start and end dates of various work items. Every work items in Jira Business initiative, Epic, Task, sub task, bug has these fields and I am trying to understand what the relationship between the start and end dates of a parent/child/grandchild ? I am assuming there is some training/blog  that I can take to help understand this better.

In my world a BI -> can have epics/tasks/bugs etc as childs/dependencies/predecessor etc, but the dates are editable, but some how keep reverting back, dates are picked at random, not sure from the parent or something else ?   how does the data flow between the various dates? Is this a configuration thing or something else ?

Also when I am trying to add a date field to a gnatt chart, I get 3 or 4 start dates,  why ? 

Is there something I can read/get trained/some knowledge on the various dates ?

Please note, the project is not the yesliberia project which is something I volunteer for. I  I am unable to share the work details at this time, 

Thanks

[Craig Castle-Mead]

Hey @auj012 

In Jira (and many other work management applications), it's up to your business/team to decide how they wish the use the available functions and data in a system to work for them. This is true for start/end dates, how you reflect your project at the Epic/Issue/Sub-Issue level, what Issue Types you include and how you classify your work items against them. In terms of relationships between the dates at different levels, they do not usually have an automated update process - they're independent, but you can use a variety of tools (gantt/ automation) to move dependent dates back/forward based on changes in dates to child/parent relationships.

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/what-is-an-epic/

https://lastcallmedia.com/blog/epics-stories-tasks-subtasks-whats-difference

https://blog.jirachecklist.com/epic-vs-story-vs-task/

https://pmcircle.wordpress.com/2015/07/30/confused-about-epic-story-task-and-sub-tasks/

Are a variety of explanations and examples that could give you

If your team works in a very method compliant way (eg: agile) then there is a MORE "correct" way to do things, but generally (I've found/seen), teams will generally align with a methodology instead of strictly adapat.

While you may have been after a much more prescribed "this is how you do it" - an application like Jira needs to provide flexibility as not every team works in the same way, so it is an "it depends" situation. 

The main suggestion I have is to ensure your team are all on the same page, and using the data/products in a similar fashion.

CCM