Is there a way for repeating issues to be shown in advance?

[Ellie Freeman]

I am trying to plan resource capacity for the next year, and many resources have repeating tasks that they know will always take a chunk of their time. However, with repeating issues only being created when the time comes, this doesn't help with forward planning. Is there any way to automatically create repeating issues for the future? 

[Alex Christensen · Accepted solution]

You'll need an add-on to auto-create new repeating tasks - there's no built-in functionality for Jira for this.

You might find some luck with these add-ons:

• The Scheduler (I've used this briefly and it works great, in my opinion)
• Recurring Tasks for Jira Cloud

[Ellie Freeman]

Thanks very much Alex. I have set up the auto-create new repeating tasks (I believe we have the Recurring Tasks for Jira Cloud add-on. 

My problem is that these will only be added to the list as the time comes, rather than preempting them being there. For example, a task occurring weekly for the next year; I am trying to make it so that there are 52 instances that can be seen and factored in as of today. Instead of an extra task appearing each week? 

I hope this explains my problem in more detail. 

Many thanks 

Ellie 

[Alex Christensen]

Ah, okay, thanks for clarifying. :)

In my opinion, if you already know that these resources have to complete these tasks no matter what, I'd go ahead and create them in Jira (negating the use of the Recurring Tasks add-on in this case). That way, you can easily resource plan on those tasks that you know are going to happen for sure. If it's a weekly task, for example, you could just update the the summary of the issue with the week that task needs to be done and/or update the due date of the field to the appropriate date, too.

Hope this helps!

[Ellie Freeman]

That's really useful - thank you! I did wonder if that would be the best thing to do, but didn't know if I was missing something with the repeating tasks, and didn't want to manually create hundreds of tasks needlessly! 

Thanks very much 

Ellie 

[Alex Christensen]

Yeah, creating a lot of the same task can be time consuming. :( If you are a Jira admin or your admin has enabled the CSV import option for general users, I'd look into that. In cases where I have to do a lot of task entry, I've found it quicker to prepare in a spreadsheet then upload via CSV if you have that option.

Happy I could help out here!

[Shaston McNaspy]

Any idea how to report on the repeatable tasks?  For monthly metrics....

[Alex Christensen]

@Shaston McNaspy, what type of reporting do you need? I guess you could add a label or have some custom field set to a certain value on all of these tasks created using an add-on like The Scheduler, then use JQL queries to create filters and dashboards on that data.

[Shaston McNaspy]

That's a good idea.  JQL would work great for that.  Thank you.