Roadmap - sub task end dates don't update Epic

[Paul Steckler]

I enjoy the concept of a roadmap, a visual Epic view (we use Big Gantt for this today but often it's overkill). 

The issue:

• Add start & due dates for an Epic
• Add a child task and add a due date which is longer than the Epic's due date

Result - roadmap is not updated.

Ideally the roadmap would show this extension, perhaps in a different color denoting that something is now stretching out after the intended due date.

[Hemanth Kumar]

There is light weight, and there is completely useless.

If there is no indication of the due dates of child tasks at the epic level, then whats the point of setting a due date on an epic anyway?

[Bertrand Egsbaek]

Hello @Erika Sa any update on this? I am currently working on setting up several different projects with about 200 stories each and each time a dozen of roadmaps. I would like to setup a portfolio roadmap where I can play around with the Epics and have the stories date follow. The same way sub-task follow stories (as I can observe).

Many thanks in advance!!!

Bertrand.

[Alistair Murdoch]

I am feeling same pain now  from comments of 2 years ago In road map view. Epic dates have to be linked to child issues dates and provide  visual duration ( as per epic) for each child issue, not just the status of the issue.

Any update?

[Erika Sa]

Hi @Paul Steckler

Thanks for your feedback. 

Ideally, it makes sense that due dates of epic and its children should automatically adjust according to each other. But we also know that it's commonplace for different teams to have different definition of 'done' when it comes to epics (i.e. epics can be considered shipped or done without stories on final clean up completed). It also happens surprisingly often that a user would accidentally submit wrong due date for stories. 

Since roadmap is a new feature in its early stage, we kept it simple and light-weight. However, we'll be watching how teams are using roadmap and keeping your feedbacks close to heart to learn and iterate on the experience to make it smarter. 

If you're using epics and roadmap extensively with your team, we'd love to chat to you more about your experience. If interested, please fine some time here. 

Cheers,

Erika Sa

Atlassian product manager

[Paul Steckler]

Thanks for the response Erika.

With the new Agile template being kept simple, which we **really** like, roadmap as a purely manual construct simply won't scale to where we need it to be without some amount of aggregation in Due Date.

Our outline looks like this:

1. Epic - The big, often 6 month long work item.
   1. Story 1 - aerial collection (we fly airplanes and build maps)
   2. Story 2 - processing of incoming data.
   3. Story 3 - delivery to customers

In traditional Gantt and such these would truly, for the most part, waterfall (sorry agile people, this is the world we have). For visualization either a) we set a Due Date on the Epic. Or the _latest_ Due Date of a child pushes the roadmap item out. 

We don't need the big complexity (we use Big Gantt plugin today which is brings it's own set of issues) but without some form of roll-up then roadmap is more or less just a bunch of pretty lozenges we have to deal with manually.

We have ~200 Epics at any given moment to track and report on.

[Erika Sa]

Thanks for providing more context @Paul Steckler, this is very helpful. We'll take this into account for future iteration.

In the meantime, could you tell us a bit more about the report you do on ~200 epics? What does it look like today  and what should it look like in an ideal world? 

[Paul Steckler]

Erika - give me a shout directly and I'm happy to walk you through the labyrinth :-)

The data is fairly confidential so better if we could screen share perhaps. I can also show you a) ideal, b) less than ideal, c) Smartsheet version, and d) where we'd like to wind up. Tricky project (they all say that I'm sure).

[Erika Sa]

Not sure how to message you directly here @Paul Steckler but feel free to email me directly to esa@atlassian.com or book some time with me here. 

[Steve Lanaghen]

I agree with Paul.  There has to be some kind of of date-related link between the roadmap/gantt (which is a visual representation of the date range) and the associated stories and tasks.  Otherwise it is misleading, giving the impression that all the related work will be done in that timeframe. 

At a minimum, there should be some kind of warning on stories/tasks that fall outside the epic date range and/or some indication on the roadmap that there are associated stories/tasks that fall outside the time range.

[Kevin Boosten]

Completely agree with @Steve Lanaghen. I really appreciate the Roadmap feature, but I do also really miss the connection between start- enddate of a roadmap epic and it's child issues. 

My backlog can be prioritized completely different than my roadmap visually represents, and there's nothing restricting me to adhere to that planning. 

[Sergio Costa]

I totally agree with Paul. 

Roadmap is a really cool (and useful) feature, but done update the EPIC due date based in child tasks due due date is painful.

[Adarsh Pandey]

Total agree with Paul. It should be automated.

[Martín Nóvoa]

Totally agree with this request. Otherwise Roadmap is 90% useless.

[Kash_Sambyal]

New used to Jira roadmap and so far it looks great but 100% agree. What's the point of have a visual timeline when the underlying tasks start/due dates don't line-up. Any other Gantt chart i.e. MS Project does this. 

Going in manually clicking on each issue now and adjusting the roadmap bars so dates align : (