How is BigPicture creating the Gantt view?

[Ashley Powell]

I am looking at the Trial version of BigPicture and trying to understand how the Gantt view is being created. Is it using story points, sprints, releases or something else to determine the timeline? It's not at all obvious to me. 

Secondly, when I make changes in BigPicture, does it automatically reflect those changes in JIRA? When I used Portfolio for JIRA in the past, I had to commit any changes. 

[Tomek-SoftwarePlant]

Hi @Ashley Powell 

There are two things you should know. 

1) Program dates - those are independent of the Gantt's timeline. Consider these dates just an indicator. 

2) The earliest and the latest task of a given Gantt define a timeline. By default there are "Start date" and "End date" fields which are taken into account. 

The answer to your second question is YES. For example, you can map your custom fields to both Task start/end date fields in "Task configuration" section (see the screenshot above) and if moved a task on a timeline, your custom fields' value will get adjusted automatically.

Hope that helps.

[Ashley Powell]

This is very helpful. Thank you! I have three more questions for you. @Tomek-SoftwarePlant 

1. What if not every team works the same? Meaning, I have some teams that use story points and some teams that don't estimate at all. Can I use a different field to determine duration for different teams? Can 1 team use story points and another team use target start and end dates?

2. In the Gantt view, how can I see work at the Epic level and not every single individual task or story? I don't see how to do this in the grouping options.

3. Each time I create a new program, it is automatically creating tasks in JIRA. How do I stop this from happening?

[Tomek-SoftwarePlant]

1. Well... I wish I could say you can define a task's duration (and thus a Gantt's timeline) with Story Points, but as for now it is impossible. 

For task start/end dates you can use fields which are loaded by default (screenshot below), or you can use your own fields as long as they are Date Pickers. 

The settings can be configured either globally or per particular Jira project. 

So, assuming that each team has their own project, teams could use different fields for defining a timeline of their project. 

2. You'll need to create a task hierarchy based on Epics first. You may find this page helpful. 

Then, in the 'Gantt Column Views' screen of your Program's configuration you can choose different aggregation options (sum no parent etc.) for fields like Time Tracking etc. 

3. Which option on the Program Wizard do you normally choose? This sounds like you used 'Evaluate with sample data' option which automatically creates new Jira project and populates that project with sample data.