Is it possible to view Start/End Times in Jira Plans > Timeline View

[Caitlin Wintaur]

I am hoping to use Jira Plans > Timeline View to better manage our scheduled releases, and have greater visibility over specific details of the tickets within a release. 

However, I can't seem to add a custom date and time field into the Jira Plan - it tells me it's an unsupported field.

This is a critical field as part of our releases, to help with ordering, so would appreciate any suggestions or ideas about how to see this information in Jira Plans.

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For context:

We have multiple Release Windows in a week, and we are releasing tickets from a release-specific project. 

Individual teams create and complete work in their own separate projects, and then a ticket is created in the release-specific project which indicates that the ticket is ready for release

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We use something akin to an aircraft traffic control model for our release windows - we aim to have "timeslots" for specific tickets, based on a range of factors, so engineers know when they should be ready to release their particular ticket. 

The release-specific tickets may have dependencies on one another, or may need to be released at a specific date/time (e.g. coordinating a release with a third-party), otherwise we have a time assigned to the ticket within the release window period. 

I have been looking at Jira Plans, and so far it's giving me the information / visibility I'd like for most things.

e.g. I can visually see dependencies between tickets, priorities, and other custom fields that we have set up and actively use.

However, the last piece of the puzzle is being able to add the release date and time to this Timeline View. It's a field we use currently on the tickets, but it's an "Unsupported Field" for Jira Plans - presumably because of the time component. 

Being able to use this field would mean I can:

• sort by start date/time so I can see the time-based release order, and group by team / engineer etc (as we can have multiple teams releasing at the same time, if their work is not related)
• see a group of tickets that have dependencies on one another, and see the specific timeslots allocated to them, so we can coordinate the release of each ticket individually 
• share this information with the engineers who are involved in the release, so they know what time they need to be available for their individual tickets 

The current release date/time field is used in the normal filter / report that we are using currently to manage our releases, however this filter / report doesn't give me the same level of visibility and information as Jira Plans.

So I'd prefer to move us to Jira Plans for the extra functionality, but being able to see the start date/time is critical. 

Does anyone have any suggestions or ideas? 

[Samuel Weiss]

Hi @Caitlin Wintaur 

for the release we usually use 'Change' tickets in a Jira Service Management project (there are also all the support tickets). There you have the benefit to see conflicting changes happening at the same time or you understand quite fast that a reported issue relates to a recent release/change.

In Jira Service Management you can use planned start/end (date time) for the release windows and show them nicely in a calendar with time.

I would open for each release (a new version you deploy) a change in JSM and relate the developer issues/stories to that change. 

To open your regular release tickets automatically, I can recommend our "Work & Maintenance Scheduler" to you.

Kind regards, Samuel

[Karan Sachdev]

Hey @Caitlin Wintaur

Welcome to Atlassian Community!

We can use custom date fields in Jira plans, but date time picker fields are not supported yet. We have a suggestion ticket for this improvement: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-87687

I believe the only workaround for now is to copy that data into a custom date picker field, but it will truncate the exact time value and show only the date on the timeline.

Thanks!