How do I schedule start times for tasks?

Ted Villalba

Newbie here, on the latest releases of Jira and Greenhopper, and looking for a way to schedule start times for project tasks.

I'm picturing something like MS PRoject that allows me to specify start times and task duration. While I see the latter, I don;t see a way yet to create start times so that I may arrange tasks on the planning board accordingly.

Is there such a thing?

Thanks for the help,

Ted

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

To answer the Greenhopper side first, no, there's no way to do this. The reason is simple - in Agile you don't plan start or end times. The whole point is that you break work down into manageable chunks, prioritise them and simply work through them in order of importance. You plan a sprint (a certain amount of work goes into it, without any dates) and at the end of the sprint, you should aim to have done it all.

A sprint will have a start and end date, but the point of planning one is that the start date is always "at the end of the planning meeting" and the end date is "our sprint length later" (we use a fortnight here, some teams use a week, some use 3 or 4 weeks - up to the team). You use Jira's Versions to flag tasks as "planned-for/in sprint X" and they have release dates, which can be used for the delivery date if necessary.

In plain Jira though, a lot of people do task planning - here, we do it with tracking meta-projects - the development teams have their agile projects and then PMs roll up information at the end of sprints into the tracking project for reporting. Tasks in the tracking project have custom fields like start, end, delivery, actual dates for the planning, but they don't use Greenhopper.