Usable Gantt chart or sim. for JIRA

[Christopher Corbell]

I'm hoping to use JIRA for my team's project tracking. Using task & sub-task tickets works fine, and the Time Tracking Report is *almost* good enough - but unfortunately it will not show tasks unfolding in dependency-order in an iteration based on estimates, per resource. Basically I just need a simple Gannt chart (don't really need a lot of interactivity in it, just a better view into the planned schedule based on blocking links between tasks or similar).

I've spent some time looking at all of the plugins on the exchange that offer Gantt and have found they all seem to be broken and/or unsupported. The only one I haven't tried is the jplugs offering, but its price is prohibitive since all I want really is one chart - I would probably write my own before signing up for a $400 + $200/year subscription.

Any help, anyone? Has anyone succeeded in getting usable Gantt charts in the latest JIRA? Or will JIRA ever offer this feature?

TIA,
Christopher

[Deleted user]

I have, in my professional life, been asked this question a few times. When I ask "What do you need the Gantt chart for?" I either get no answer that makes sense, or I don't see a Gantt feature as a good solutions.

Gantt charts are very common, so a lot of people don't question their usefulness. They are taken for granted. I have seen hours spent on maintaining and reviewing Gantt charts that virtually no one ever used.

Tracking dependencies is a fair argument. But I sometimes the dependencies are so many and so complex that it is just not worth tracking them. Even with a tool you still need to define them. In those cases I think frequent interaction between developers is a better solution.

I don't question your need for a Gantt chart, I don't even know what kind of project it is. But since you only need a simple Gantt chart there might be other ways of getting the information you want.

[Christopher Corbell]

Very very basic progress-tracking use case here, just want time tracking with the tasks ordered in the way we define at the beginning of an iteration, rather than in a grab-bag-total Time Tracking Report. in fact if they could just add sequential task-linking per-developer to the Time Tracking Report that would probably suffice.

[Deleted user]

If you just need to order the tasks I think GreenHopper is useful. Use ranking and you can use drag n'drop to arrange the issues in the sequence you want.

It will not look like a Gantt chart, more like a todo list the will be complete as the team progresses. Maybe that's good enough?

[Yves YANG]

Have you tried "JIRA Gantt Chart Project"? A free version is provided.

[Mike Camper]

Please email info@reportslite.com along with your JIRA server id for 30 day free trial license. We are open to give you flexible pricing per report.

[JamieA]

Have you tried the (free) jira gannt chart plugin? Personally I've had issues with the way it wants to create about 6 custom fields, but it's worth a look.

[Christopher Corbell]

Thanks - yes I've spent about a day wrestling with this and it's either buggy or there are some fairly obscure constraints that make it fragile to use. I got the basic idea of setting the FS-depends custom field to link tasks, but sometimes it will link the tasks end-to-end chronologically and sometime it won't, and there are other misbehaviors too like tasks all getting inexplicably shifted around time gaps that shouldn't be there. Couldn't find any current reference to the product from the author (soyatec) site so I'm assuming it's unsupported.

[Christopher Corbell]

Oh correction - the problems described above pertain to the "JIRA Gantt Chart Project" from soyatec. I also tried the one you link to (by Frank Polscheit) unfortunately its web GUI hung indefinitely (even after reload) after I edited the due date on an issue, and seeing others complain about incompatibility with the latest JIRA I determined it wasn't stable enough for my team to use.

[Mike Camper]

Please take a look at ReportsLite plugin.

[Christopher Corbell]

Hmm thanks but $500/year is way more than I'm willing to consider just to get 1 graph that I need added to my JIRA.