Timeline won't show sprints except on general board

[Tyler Nielsen]

My engineering department is comprised of multiple teams. We use a single Jira project but all the engineering teams have their own board. We all organize on the same sprint cadence, so sprints are created that all teams use.

It seems that although the backlog view for my team's board in Jira shows these sprints, the timeline will not show the sprints at all. The only place it will show is if I go to the board that is basically the default board for whole project. No one uses this because it includes all issues for 10 teams. 

I've seen some posts online that say that the Timeline will only show sprints created from that board. However, this makes little sense to me since stories can be assigned to any sprint within the project, regardless of where it was created. Similarly, all other views within my board show those sprints, so it seems internally inconsistent.

Is there any way to resolve this? It seems like a huge design flaw that severely takes away from value of the Timelines feature (which otherwise, is amazing). 

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Tyler Nielsen 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

To see sprints across multiple boards in a Timeline you will need to use the Plans feature (available in Premium and Enterprise subscriptions).

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/plan-and-view-cross-project-work-with-advanced-roadmaps/

The Timeline feature that you see when you are viewing a board is a "basic" timeline feature and offers limited functionality, i.e. it displays only the sprints that were created in the board that is currently being viewed.

The basic Timeline feature to which I am referring will display in the left side navigation panel or above the board, depending on whether your instance is using the original Navigation design or the New Navigation design.

Original navigation design:

New Navigation design

[Tyler Nielsen]

Thanks for the info. That's dissapointing and a bit of a confounding limitation. I understand the limitation for "cross-project" timelines. The link you mentioned is titled "Plan and view cross-project work". However as mentioned the sprints I'm trying to see are within the project, and viewable in the other views Jira offers (backlog, active sprint, etc). 

All the same, it sounds like Jira just doesn't have the functionality that we are looking for here without enabling this separate feature. Unfortunately as I'm not an admin myself this probably means just needing to make do without it. 

Thanks again for info. 

[Trudy Claspill]

You're welcome. I'm sorry it is not the answer you hoped for.

An alternative to using separate boards per team would be to use team-oriented filters on the master board. That would enable your teams to focus on just their issues, and also be able to use the Timeline to see all the sprints.

[Tyler Nielsen]

Thanks, this ended up being the workaround I used. We still have our individual team boards, but I found that by using the Timeone on the master board and filter on the label we use to segment work to our team I can get most of the way there. 

Thanks again!