Jira Plans — A Bird’s Eye View
Recently I was asked to investigate Jira Plans and assess the value it could provide to a software project.
After an investigation of the tools was complete, it made sense to publish the results so others could benefit from the research.
What Is Jira Plans?
Jira Plans is a native implementation of the Advanced Roadmaps For Jira Add-On, available on the Premium license for Jira Cloud.
The tool capitalises on many of the elements native to the product including Releases, Teams and Sprints. Users create Plans — a combination of a scope of work, the teams assigned to complete the work and the iterations used to complete it.
An individual Plan can supports multiple scenarios, allowing users to plan their approach by factoring in different variables e.g. Team Capacity. Each scenario within a plan can be managed independently and can take advantage of task auto-scheduling.
The tool can be split into 2 interfaces, Existing and Improved, both with minor variations between them. Although this article displays the Improved Interface, both interfaces contain 3 core modules: Roadmap, Team and Releases.
Roadmap Module
The Roadmap module displays tasks in a Task View and a Timeline View. For each view, tasks on each are presented according to a task hierarchy, determined by the Parent Link fields defined on each task.
Up to 4 levels of task hierarchy can be configured on a plan, and may include items such as Epic (potentially on Level 1 or 2), Stories and Bugs (potentially on Level 2 or 3) and Subtask (potentially on Level 3 or 4).
Users can choose which levels of the hierarchy they want to view by opening and closing levels int he Task View.
Below are a list of other relevant features:
Scheduling
Tasks can be scheduled to Releases, Teams, Assignees and Sprints. Jira Plans allows for tasks to be scheduled according to these fields.
There are 3 options for scheduling:
- Automatic (All scheduling fields are overriden when automatic scheduling is run)
- Semi-automatic (Scheduling fields with empty values are overriden when automatic scheduling is run)
- Manual (You edit the start and end dates yourself)
Automatic scheduling considers a number of different factors, which are explained in more detail here.
Scenario Planning
Jira Plans allows users to experiment with different scenarios (versions) of a plan. Some variations between scenarios could include different teams, team capacities, estimates and task dependencies.
These variations can also impact the way the auto-scheduler assigns work. While multiple scenarios can exist on a plan at one time, only one can be in effect once the plan is saved.
Dependency Management
Dependencies utilise the blocks/is blocked by relationship that is native to Jira issues. They can be sequential (blocked tasks don‘t ’start until their blocker is complete) or concurrent (blocked tasks can start alongside their blocker).
Rolled-Up Estimation
The estimate values of children tasks (e.g. User Stories) can be configured to roll up onto a parent task (e.g. Epics). Users can also provide a manual estimate if an aggregated estimate doesn’t meet their needs.
Filtering, Sorting and Grouping
Scope has a standard set of filtering options, including by: Releases, Teams, Assignee, Issue Types, Dependencies and Statuses. Grouping can also occur on similar fields, while Sorting can be on 1 column at a time.
Custom Field Visualisation
Custom fields can be added to the Roadmap View and updated from that interface. Management of custom fields (e.g. readability and automation) is covered within Jira.
The start and end date of tasks on the roadmap is also configurable, but is dependent on a task’s default Start Date and End Date field by default.
Basic Reporting
The link to a roadmap link can be copied, or an embedded iframe can be applied. That said, Jira offers additional reporting through Jira reports and dashboard.
Users can choose from a pre-existing set of gadgets, or create and buy new ones (some are included with Jira add-ons).
Teams Module
A Team encapsulates the members of the team, their project methodology and a board/sprints they are assigned.
Teams can be created locally for a plan or be shared across plans. Members of a team can be a licensed user or a virtual users (which can act as a placeholders for a required role or group of roles e.g. Project Manager, Content Editing).
Some key configuration options for a team include:
- Estimation Type (Hours, Days or Story Points)
- Velocity (measured based on the choice above)
- Iteration Type (Scrum or Kanban)
Kanban iterations cannot be paired with Story Points.
In the Roadmap module, the Remaining Estimate appears as the estimates (in days or hours) or Story Points, while the progress on that estimate is captured using a read-only progress bar. Users can also see a progress bar based on the number of issues completed or story points completed.
In Jira Plans, you’ll also notice a team’s capacity per iteration is simplified to overall team capacity rather than individual capacity.
Releases Module
Releases is a list of native Jira releases that belong to the related project. Cross-project releases are a combination of multiple releases from different projects.
There are 3 options for managing the start date of a release:
- As early as possible (No Start Date Applied)
- Fixed date
- Relative to previous release date
And 2 options for the end date of a release:
- After all issues are completed
- Fixed Date
You might decide to manage releases based on fixed dates, the completion of tasks in a release. You might also want to start a release based on another release being finished, but give it a fixed end date.
There is quite a bit of flexibility in how you manage releases.
Conclusion
Some of key feature of Jira Plans include auto-scheduling, a simplified interface and strong integration with the Jira platform. Based on the features above, it’s clear the main purpose of Plans is to understand and schedule the work that needs to be done.
My next article gives an overview of BigPicture, and how it focuses more on overall project strategy and governance.
