How to auto-schedule to populate dates on all your jira tickets based on Durations?

[Muhammad Usman Riaz]

Hi, 

We in our company are using JIRA enterprise and have quite a big program that we're managing on the Advanced Roadmaps. Our Issue type hierarchy is as follows:

Project: Representing the Market in scope (UK, Ireland, Iceland etc.)

Initiative: Phases of the project (Ideation, Transition Initiation and Planning etc.)

Epics: High level steps to be conducted in each phase (Establish project team, create project plan etc.)

Tasks: A more granular breakdown of steps in epics. Tasks are not always utilized. 

We have a lot of tickets in our Project portfolio and only have durations for each activity (10 days, 20 days etc.). To populate the Start/End Dates, we take the duration and start adding it to the Start Date, to come to an End Date. And we have to manually do this for all the tickets which is quite a time-consuming process. 

My question is, if possible, how can I use the Auto-Schedule feature to take the durations of all activities listed and automatically populate all the dates in my tickets on the roadmap.

Please feel free if you need further clarification and thanks in advance for the help.

[Mark Segall]

Hi @Muhammad Usman Riaz and welcome to the community!

Auto-Schedule is more intended for sprints.  For what you're trying to do, you probably want to leverage automation.  To help with this, I just need to know if your duration field is numeric or actually capturing as "n days".  The answer would have an impact on the rule, but as a base, it would work something like this:

• TRIGGER: Field Value Changed (Duration, Start Date)
• ACTION: Edit Issue (End Date)

  • {{Start Date.plusDays(Duration)}}

This rule would trigger when the Start Date or Duration is updated and set the End date accordingly provided the duration field is numeric.  If it's a text field, we'll have to add a bit to the smart value.

[Riaz_ Muhammad Usman]

Hey @Mark Segall 

Thanks for getting back to that. We have a Duration Estimate field that I plan on using, it is supposed to be filled like this in case of 30 days : 30d

But the method you proposed, in case of a big roadmap with loads of tickets, still would have to go through all tickets and add Duration and Start Date? Because I'm looking for a solution where I enter the Start Date of the first activity and duration of all, and all end dates and start dates of following tickets get auto populated. 

[Mark Segall]

You're basically looking for Jira to provide Microsoft Project type functionality where the "project plan" is dynamically built out based upon predecessors.  This won't be possible natively because Jira is designed for Agile ways of working where you simply plan your activity into sprints.   

I would recommend looking into the marketplace for apps that can provide more waterfall ways of working.

[Riaz_ Muhammad Usman]

Alright, appreciate the help @Mark Segall . 

One last bit of support since you understand my dilemma, if there would be some apps you have in mind that could help me with this issue, would be great. 

Thanks again! 

[Mark Segall]

There will likely be some marketplace partners that will give more insights into what their respective solutions can provide so take my recommendation as just an option.

Ideally, you would want to look into your processes and adopt some type of scaled agile framework so you can leverage Jira to the fullest for planning, tracking and reporting.  However, if this isn't in the cards, I've had success with combining Smartsheet with the Jira add-on.  Using Smartsheet as the high-level, strategic planning and Jira for the more tactical. 

One advantage to going this route vs a marketplace app is that most marketplace apps license based upon number of Jira users rather than who actually needs the app. Whereas an app like Smartsheet will only license based upon those who need authoring rights.