Showing gaps on Epics in timelines in Jira

Question

Does Jira not have a way of enabling or allowing you to create "gaps" in the Timeline on a Epic?

It feels odd, saying you have a big project with epics, where you in February buy equipment for a new office, but the next story or "task" that has to be done does not start before April or march due to having to wait for electricity installations.

At the moment on Epic level, you can't really define saying "I plan on buying equipment from Feb 1 -> Feb 5. After that, next step wont happen before March 19.. You could "visualize this with many stories"
1: Purchase of equipment from Feb. 1 --> Feb 5. 
2. Install of equipment from March 5 --> March 10.

But the "epic" will still make a timeline from Feb 1 all the way to March 10, which i understand as its project spands from this day to this end date, and work is being done within this timeline, where i would rather see some "gaps" in the timeline showing where no work is being done due to having to wait for external installations you cant do etc.

Mads Aagaard Andersen · Answer

Yeah, i was thinking of that as well. However it just created a lot of work timewise to set it up, as you would have to create a ton of more Stories to outline that, so that you say 1. Buying Equipment
2. Installing Equipment
3. QA

And then when you have equipment of 10 different kinds, speakers, TV's and so on, it's hard to do this and very time consuming compared to having a "adjustable" "epic timeline" or "field" where you could "grey out" the timeline based off dates or something.

But yeah i came that far also, was more curious if there was a workaround, or if there was some administration setting allowing you to add that kind of setting / field.

Matt Parks · Answer

I guess it all depends on how you want to view the work but, from my perspective, the timeline of an epic is generally from when the work stops until when the work completes, regardless of whether there is "time off" during that process.

If you're creating a Plan/Roadmap for this, you can always include the stories under the epic and have their timeframes included, which would allow you to see any gaps when no work is expected to be performed on the epic, but that's probably the best that you could do.