How to make Target Start and End Dates auto-populate from Sprint Start and End dates?

[Joseph Leiba]

There is this option in the Plan configuration to "use sprint dates when issues don't have start and end dates".  It doesn't seem to do anything, and I can't find any documentation on what needs to be done to make it happen.

I have asked our scrum masters to populate all the Sprint dates so these will show up in the plans, but the plans are not populating.

It seems there should be some extra steps to populate these fields, so you can review them before committing them to Jira, but I can't find any instructions on how to do this.

(Jira v8.13.5, Advanced Roadmaps for Jira v3.29.7)

[Aaron Gage · Accepted solution]

Do you have the Board(s) associated with the Sprints included in your Issue Sources?  I think you'll need that for this feature to work.

[Joseph Leiba]

Thank you for the suggestion @Aaron Gage. That may have something to do with it.  This Plan has two sources:

1. Project -- Not the same project as those issues which are failing to populate target dates.
2. Filter -- Filter includes tickets from other projects.

Is there some documentation that would help me understand why the board needs to be included as a source?

Is there a reason why the Target Dates shouldn't auto-populate in this plan from the Sprint Dates?

[Aaron Gage]

I *think* sprints and thus sprint dates are tied to boards so the only way the tool knows the dates for the sprints is to input the board as a source.  I agree that it should be able to see any issue with a Sprint field populated and go out to the associated board and pull the dates.  Maybe there is an enhancement request to do this already that we could vote for...?

[Joseph Leiba]

I *think* sprints and thus sprint dates are tied to boards so the only way the tool knows the dates for the sprints is to input the board as a source.

You solved my problem with this insight.  Thank you for sharing your experience.  Here's how I solved the problem without including irrelevant issues in my Plan:

1. I created a new Scrum Board using the same JQL filter as I used in my plan.  (It's the same as Filter source #2 above).
2. Added this board as another source to my plan.

I didn't even bother removing the Filter source from my plan when I added the new board as the third source.  The dates are now populating!

The Atlassian documentation on Scheduling in Advanced Roadmaps should explain this more thoroughly.

[Joseph Leiba]

And here's a bigger question:  How are we supposed to make a "Roadmap" that pulls from multiple projects without having to manually set a huge number of target dates just to get the timeline chart to populate?  Must we include the boards from all those projects?   If so, then it seems impossible to manage the scope of the roadmap effectively.   When a company embarks on an initiative, the initiative will likely entail work across numerous projects, each with their own boards.   The scope of a plan seems best managed through filters, not collections of boards.  How can Advanced Roadmaps be used to manage plans involving such initiatives?

It seems we must choose between two unfavorable scenarios.  Either we have an overwhelming amount of manual work to keep the Plan up to date, or we have so much irrelevant stuff in the Plan making it difficult to glean any meaning out of it.

[Aaron Gage]

@Joseph Leiba Agree with everything you've said and wish I had an answer for you.  My responses only come from my own experiences and have wished multiple times it worked like you suggested.

I'll respond to your other post about the sprint dates.

I also hate having to include Boards in the issues sources cause with our boards it usually comes with a bunch of issues that have nothing to do with the Initiative I'm trying to roadmap.  I also think there is a bug somewhere because even though I deselect everything not under the Initiative on the last step for building the plan, they still show up....