Gantt-Chart for agile Planning

Owned by Frank Polscheit
Last updated: Feb 24, 2021
4 min read

Agile Planning using Jira Software:

  • Create your stories

  • Estimate your stories in story points (or continue to use Jira’s time tracking with original estimated efforts, time spend and remaining efforts: both approaches can co-exist)

  • Create a sprint

  • Assign some stories to your sprint

  • Start your sprint

Optionally: use Jira Portfolio

  • Configure multi-level hierarchies

  • Create your portfolio plan

View that on “Gantt-Chart for Jira”

Switch to the Gantt-Chart Panel by clicking on the Gantt icon within the navigation menu on the left.

  • All business projects will be represented using the “Standard View” initially.

  • All software projects will be represented using the “Sprint View” initially.

On Jira Cloud and on Jira Server/DataCenter since version 5.5.x, an admin can configure a default view globally. Each project admin can also configure a project default view within the project administration overwriting the global one. Each user can modify the look and feel and store it as a new individual view, which will be remembered coming back the next time except a default view (global or project-based) is configured as starting point.

All issues are displayed as hierarchy defined by their rank on the agile board and optionally by the settings of Jira Portfolio. On this ”Standard View”, you see the full work-break-down hierarchy (WBS):

If you select a different pre-defined view like “Sprints View”, you see your sprints and related issues including their story points on the Gantt-Chart: “target start” and “target end” have been configured as custom fields to contain the planned start and end dates. All of them have got a postfix ** to illustrate, that their content represents suggested calculations, automatically created based on story points multiplied by the sprint's hoursPerStoryPoints. If you have configured any hourly value/story point for this project within the project administration → Gantt-Chart → time equivalent, then that value will be used. Otherwise, hoursPerStoryPoints will be calculated as sum of story points of all issues of that sprint relating to the same assignee divided by the number of working days of the sprint to get an average.

Issues belonging to the same assignee are scheduled as a sequence one after the other.

Issues belonging to different assignees are scheduled in parallel.

In this sample, you see on the first screen copy above that this first sprint shall end at 14/Sept/2019, but on the Gantt-Chart you see that you will need until 19/Sept/2019: that’s a first indicator that you should (re-)validate your estimations, assignments and/or time equivalent based on your team velocity of the past.

On the “Resources View” you see the assignees' utilization in hours to check for planned overwork.

Beside using the pre-defined views, you can modify grouping as well as displayed columns in the middle area inclusive their sorting and save it a customized view per user or share it as project administrator. In the following sample, we use the Standard View and just modify the grouping to Epics → Sprints → Rank:

This results in the following Gantt-Chart: you have got quite a lot of options for customizing …

A story does not have configured timetracking but story points by default. But if you use e.g. subtasks, then these issues will not be display on your agile board and they have not got the field “story points” configured by default. If you enable usage of Jira’s native “time tracking” for subtasks, you can estimate effort in time for this “smaller tasks”. In such case, keep the related story unestimated in story points as it is just a kind of bracket issue: both approaches will be automatically combined by the Gantt-Chart app. If an issue has got story points as well as estimations in time, then the original estimated effort will be taken as it is a or should be a bit more accurate than story points as measurement of complexity.