Introducing dependency & progress for roadmaps in Jira Software Cloud

[Jimi Wikman]

Of course.

I am however busy this week and next with a project, so if it would be possible to arrange the call in two weeks time? My workload should look better then :)

[Guillaume Cougard]

@Erika Sa I think many of us are sharing the same opinion as Mr Wikman, using epics as the starting point for a roadmap is a bit odd, and our team is absolutely not able to use roadmaps because of this...

[Lene Lykke Erichsen]

Hi, at what time will the unfolding of epics-feature become available? I can't see that it is a possibility in my current project roadmap. @Erika Sa 

Thanks, Lene

[Andy Leatherland]

Really good feature extension, been driving my Jira manager mad for this. A video woud be a good idea.

[Andy Leatherland]

What would be a nice feature would be to have a promotion demotion line like in the backlog view for the roadmap, so that product can focus on a smaller amount of key epics within a larger roadmap?

[Ed Haynes]

@Erika Sa I can probably deal with it turning red.  Although I deal with some old school people who like traditional waterfall plans, so having the ability to automatically readjust to show them the impact of their change requests would make my job easier.

Also, if a story/task within one epic is blocked by a story/task in another epic, will the dependency line show up?  Like many others I'd like the ability to build this out at a story/task level in addition to epics.  Because I can have two epics going on concurrently, but one story in Epic B may be dependent on the completion of a story in Epic A.  And it's highly possible that Epic B could be completed prior to A due to additional stories in A that B doesn't depend on.

[Erika Sa]

@Jimi Wikman that should work! check out the calendly link again, we opened up a few more slots. 

@Lene Lykke Erichsen hopefully in 2 months or so, fingers crossed!

@Ed Haynes dependency line only shows between epics as of today. We'll look into story level dependency visualisation in the future :) 

[Edward Strickland]

so this is just an adaptation of the existing sprint roadmap feature with an additional way to plan epics in to these issue types. 

And still no custom workflow 1 year on.  We don't need another roadmap feature we need custom workflows.  This is low hanging fruit in terms of what the next gen projects still do not deliver in terms of feature parity with the fully fledged version of jira and as an update it's minuscule in terms of effort as this feature existed already and is just a different already existing view.

[Ed Haynes]

@Erika Sa I just want to make sure I understand it clearly.  If a story within an epic is blocked by another epic or a story in another epic, that dependency will not show up.  The tool only show dependencies between epics.  Correct?

[Jimi Wikman]

@Ed HaynesIt looks that way right now:

[Ed Haynes]

@Jimi Wikman thank you. Fingers crossed for deeper linking in the future.  At least I can take this off the list of things our in-house asana proponents chirp about.

[Michael Matyus]

I have Next Gen/Roadmap enabled and it's great, but is there an estimated release date for "Roadmap hierarchies"? Is it one month away? One quarter away? 

[Tal Levi]

There are a few features that would make the roadmap amazing:

• Environment Road-map: Have a general environment roadmap that shows all the epics from all next-gen projects. We have a project for every squad and it would be great it management would be able to see an overall roadmap 
• Children Due Dates: Assign due dates to an Epic's children according to the epic's due date by default.
• Multiple Assignees: Have an assignee for each role in an epic - For example: Product Lead, Dev Lead, QA, etc. And have it show on the roadmap. It will make it easier to plan who does what for the long-term.
• Drag and Drop: After you add the children view in the roadmap: Add the ability to drag them to another epic!
• Customized Columns: Add the ability to add fields in Epics as columns to the roadmap view - For example, we have a Zeplin link field (that shows the project's design) and we'd love to have it next to the epic name. More examples: Branch name / URL, Product Spec (docs/confluence), bit-bucket commits to branch, etc. Just to have a really organized table of all the projects that are taking place in the squad.
• Feature Updates: It would be great if there were feature updates (for next-gen in general) appear somewhere in the platform. We keep on finding out about them by coincidence! :) It would be nice to have something like slack's gift icon that appears whenever there are updates!

Looking forward to more amazing features!

[Jimi Wikman]

@Tal Levi  sounds like you want to bring in features that Jira and it's road map does not really handle.

• Environment Road-Map - Considering many use rapid- or Continous deploy strategies that would not really be useful from Jira. Integration from Bamboo could provide that, but I think your need is more aimed at Jira Align and not Roadmap? In a team everyone know exactly what has been deployed where.
• Children Due Date - A great feature, but the question is how many children you will actually have and how much of a strain it will be on your system to recalculate. Not everyone will have 2-5 children as I am sure some will use this incorrectly and have hundreds och children ;) The question is also how this would work with grand children, ie sub tasks? With 20 children that all have 10 children this can be a pain in the xxx if you don't want certain children to be recalculated...
• Multiple Assignees - Again I think you are more looking for Jira Align. In a team you will know every role by heart so that information will be just a useless excersise in documentation. For portfolio management that is useful, not for a team roadmap.
• Drag and drop - Yes! And why not let us drag an epic inside another epic and have it transform to a story?

I have seen many users request similar things as you do and I always direct them to a proper portfolio instead of the Road Map. They have different goals and limitations, so you want the best product for your need :)

[Michał Cichy]

Only on next-gen projects? Sure. If I would like to use Trello I would use it...

[Daniel]

Good job! looking forward to see "Roadmap hierarchies" working. Congratulations!

[Bryce Carroll]

Just adding to the feedback from Steven Skarratt, and Jason Kosecki. Since so many appreciate the ability to customize Jira which is only available in classic projects, that this new feature has a limited applicability, until it's available to all software projects, not just next-gen. 

[Andy Leatherland]

Do we have an ETA for this enhancement please, and how will it work with Initiatives as Epics with Sub epics below, then features, stories, tasks, sub tasks.

[Nico Jedamczyk]

next-gen projects are not an option for us, as long as they do not support all the features of the classic projects

roadmap is only available for next-gen unfortunately:
https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftwarecloud/working-with-next-gen-software-projects-945104895.html

[mohamed.bennouar]

HEllo quite interresting evolution.

Do you have an estimated release time for the adding of the hierarchy among tasks.

Do you plan to add the dependencies possibilities between user stories ?

Moreover do you plan to add the team notion in order to work on cross-team dependencies.

[Michael Moore]

Yes this is an awesome feature, but it's difficult to migrate until we can modify workflows.

[Mohamed zouaghi]

Would it be possible to include the possibility to select view by "Sprints" cycle on top of Weeks, Months and Quarters from the Roadmap page?

Currently our teams (10+) are following a fixed 3 weeks long sprints and we'd like to be able to see the projection of Epics based on sprint cycles (Not month cycles).

I understand this would need the activation  of the feature "possibility to schedule sprints in advance" (meaning before "Start"ing them) and this is also an important request from us. Reason is that our Scrum Masters plan their respective sprints (and sprint ceremonies) ahead.

[Tal Levi]

@Jimi Wikman

Our R&D is constructed of about 50 employees, and Jira Align is aimed for enterprise users with a larger amount of users. Next-gen works perfect for our size -  we're divided into squads that are constructed of 7-12 members, and squad has a project . I think it's a basic requirement to see all of them combined for managers to have an overview :)

We've also tried to use the roadmap before and it didn't work well with next-gen, and overall required a lot of work that wasn't worth it.

What I'm asking for is just to a have the same simple roadmap that the next-gen have that includes all the next-gen projects :)

@Erika Sa Is that something that may be on the roadmap?

[Jimi Wikman]

@Tal LeviI understand :)

You have 3 flavors of this type of overview at the moment:

1. Jira Align - Business Strategic Portfolio
2. Portfolio for Jira - IT portfolio
3. Roadmaps - Team portfolio

In your case you would either have a single project to hold all teams. This will allow you to see the "big picture". Each team can have their own board, but they share the same project. This is a common setup and it comes with some disadvantages such as scaling and that everyone must share the same setup.

Portfolio for Jira allow you to scale up and place the tool above the teams. This will allow you to feed data from multiple projects into one overview and you can scale the issue types as well with new parent-child relations if needed.

With 50 people I would say that functionally you want Portfolio for Jira, but it is a bit over the top. I would instead use the Roadmap in a single project using separate boards and a custom field for teams to allocate correctly.

[Julien Klein]

Great to see that you have a plan to roll out roadmap hierarchies for nxt gen projects. Without the ability to quickly look at stories and subtasks underneath each epic, the roadmap feature is unfortunately not practical, and it is prompting my team members to go back to other gantt chart type tools, duplicating efforts and wasting time.