Support for milestones?

[Peter Callies]

Does the Gantt Chart plugin provide support for plotting milestones in the Gantt chart?

[Frank Polscheit · Accepted solution]

Yes, that's build-in: please put at least the customfield "Gantt-Option" to your create/edit screen or default screen and click on "milestone" as shown below AND have entered a due date for this issue:

Within the Gantt-Chart, this issue will de drawn as milestone having a diamond image in green switching to red if the related planned end date becomes greater than the due date. Additionally, any milestone is drawn within the e.g. the version row to get a better overview:

Using my Gantt-Chart versions v.2.0.3 (JIRA 5.0.x) or v.2.1.2 (JIRA 5.1.x), you have to link issue dependencies to milestones using JIRA's standard link features. But you can download pre-v.2.0.4/2.1.3 from my server at http://www.polscheit.de/plugins/jira/gantt-chart/gantt-2.0.4.jar or http://www.polscheit.de/plugins/jira/gantt-chart/gantt-2.1.3.jar having build-in interactive linking from issues to milestones within Gantt-Charts.

Regards,
Frank

[Peter Callies]

That answers my question, but here is an enhancement request.

We use JIRA for portfolio management among other things. Each portfolio project (a custom type of issue) of course has a start date and end date, but it also has other fields to track dates such as technical readiness and operational readiness. Effectively, we're tracking milestone dates within the issue, not as separate issues.

I'd like to see these dates plotted as a diamond on the portfolio project's line not as separate issues/lines.

[Frank Polscheit]

An issue can have own planning dates as well as being marked as milestone. In that case, the milestone will be drawn as single diamond at due date. The duration (between planned start and end date) are used as time buffer e.g. in case of shifting: but this is not what I think you'll need.

What you can do:

Use an issue without any planning and create one sub-issue having the planned start and end date and a set of sub-issues representing your various milestones.

In the folded view, your issue and sub-issues are displayed within one row like shown below.

Using my Gantt action "create sub-issue", you are not limited to one level of sub-issues, so that you can do the above proposal on sub-issues having sub-sub-issues etc. as well.

Does this help a bit?

[Frank Polscheit]

How much milestone dates do you need per issue?
Are they separate customfields?

[Peter Callies]

That helps a bit, but it's not a workable solution for us because I need something more intuitive and I need to be able to generate other non-Gantt reporting. Thanks for your timely responses.

[Peter Callies]

We've currently got three milestone dates, but I could see more being possible. For configurationof your plugin, I can envision a list of date fields and allowing multiple selection.