Auto scheduling roadmap items in Easy Agile roadmap

[Jon 'Approver' Newton]

It seems that you must manually place and schedule items on the roadmap.  I'm using the structure plugin which is writing start/finish dates into custom fields and I would like to have easy agile use those to place the items.  Is that possible?

[Seamus Kieran · Accepted solution]

Hi Jonathan, thanks for reaching out.

We record Roadmap scheduling data as a non-viewable property of the epic. This is to accomodate for teams to be able to schedule an epics at multiple locations on the roadmap (on multiple themes/to represent the epic pausing work etc.) as if we save it as a visible custom field Jira would encounter errors and clash with other aspects of the software. This is also the reason why we do not schedule Epic on the roadmaps according to their Due Date or estimation, to allow greater flexibility for teams to use Easy Agile Roadmaps as a communication tool.

We are currently exploring better ways of handling this data, can you please reach out to me at support@easyagile.com to continue the conversation?

Please let me know if I can do anything more to assist you.

Kind Regards,
Seamus Kieran
Easy Agile Support Team

[Teagan]

Hi @Jon 'Approver' Newton ,

My name is Teagan and I am a Product Manager at Easy Agile. I wanted to reach out on behalf of Seamus to let you know we have shipped Easy Agile Roadmaps 4.0.

This release includes the ability to synchronise the Roadmap schedules with the Start/Due date fields in Jira. This synchronisation works both ways:

• Date fields uses set on issues will determine where issues are set on the Roadmap
• Schedule changes made on the Roadmap will update the date fields on your issues

Now that the date fields are synchronised to the issue, not just to the board, the issue will appear in the same position across multiple boards. Not only does this make it easy to co-ordinate work across teams, it allows roll-up or aggregate roadmaps to be created quickly and easily.

You can read the full release notes here.

We wanted to say a big thank you for your patience and feedback while we worked on bringing you this functionality. As always, we're keen to hear your feedback so please feel free to send it through via this thread.

Thanks Jonathon, we're looking forward to your feedback!
Teagan Harbridge
Product Manager - Easy Agile 

[Elizabeth Wheeler]

Hi Teagan, 

I just checked out Easy Agile Roadmaps.  The Start date & Due Date synchronization works well and really adds to the visualization.  Nice work!

[Teagan]

Hi @Elizabeth Wheeler

Thanks for your feedback! The team is thrilled to hear the date synchronisation is being well received. 

Please feel to reach out anytime if there is any other feedback you'd like to share with our team or anything we can help with. 

Thanks Elizabeth, 
Teagan Harbridge 
Product Manager - Easy Agile 

[Teagan]

Hi @Jon 'Approver' Newton

Teagan reaching out on behalf of Seamus. 

I wanted to ask for your perspective and feedback, and put forward a few of our big unaswered questions on the best possible path forward to implementing auto-scheduling in Easy Agile Roadmaps. 

A few big questions for you:

• Currently, Easy Agile Roadmaps offers users the ability to schedule a single issue/epic multiple times on the Roadmap. Would you forego this piece of functionality for the ability to use the issue's start/end date to auto-update the Roadmap and issues? Why/why not?
• Would you like the ability to do both? That is, schedule a single issue multiple times as well as auto-update the Roadmap and start/end date on the issues? If yes, how would you expect the following situation to be handled:
  • If the same epic/issue has been scheduled on the Roadmap 3 times, how would you expect that we treat the issue's start/end date on the issue itself? Would we store the Start Date as the earliest date that the first issue has been scheduled on the Roadmap, and the End Date as the end date of the 3rd time the issue was scheduled on the Roadmap?
• What happens when an Epic is shared across multiple boards - if one team update the position of a shared epic on their Board's Roadmap, how does that impact where the Epic would appear on another team's Roadmap?
• Permissions: Do all users have permission to update an epic/issue's start/end date on the issues themselves? If not, would you expect that these permissions be carried across into Easy Agile Roadmaps (that is, only users with permissions to update start/end dates can schedule issues onto the Roadmap)? How else could you see the permissions being defined? 

Really looking forward to hearing your feedback! 

Thanks Jonathan, 
Teagan Harbridge
Product Manager - Easy Agile 

[Giona]

Hi, 

great from your side to reach out for community feedabacks!

I know that's kind of an old thread, but I'll give you an answer anyways.

• Would you forego this piece of functionality for the ability to use the issue's start/end date to auto-update the Roadmap and issues? Why/why not?
  
  Yes, without reserves!
  The manual "drag&drop" of issue into the Roadmap is an annoying and prone to error action. Addition, thanks to the basically great start/due-date synch feature, it override the start/due date that might have been carefully placed during the creation of the issue itself.
  Having an Issue multiple times in the Roadmap, it is to me conceptually wrong. It might be handy sometime, to allow a better overview especially in bigger project. But it does not overcome the convenience of an "auto-roadmap" feature by miles!
  
  
• Would you like the ability to do both?
  No need.
  
  
• What happens when an Epic is shared across multiple boards - if one team update the position of a shared epic on their Board's Roadmap, how does that impact where the Epic would appear on another team's Roadmap?
  
  As far as I'm concerned, it would be great if the tool would alert the user saying "look, this Issue does not belong only to you, are you sure you really want to move it? This might affect other's team schedule as well!"
  Other than that, this concern applies on all other fields of the Issues as well. Therefore you eventually should treat them as Jira: the last entered data wins.
  
  
• Permissions: Do all users have permission to update an epic/issue's start/end date on the issues themselves? If not, would you expect that these permissions be carried across into Easy Agile Roadmaps (that is, only users with permissions to update start/end dates can schedule issues onto the Roadmap)? How else could you see the permissions being defined? 
  
  No preference here.

Additionally, I think that it would be great if the Roadmap-Themes would be more powerful, actually it would be great if they could be configured as the standard Kanban swim-lanes via filters.

It would be great to be able to have swimlanes "per assignee" which automatically collects the assignee's Issues underneath.

Thank you & Best regards.

[Giona]

Additional feature ideas that would ease our job or improve our working experience:

• showing the assignee on the Roadmap card would already bee helpful
• Adding recurring "Date marker", to be able to mark e.g. sprints or PIs
  e.g.
  Base name: 2020 Quarter 2
  Start date: 01.04.2020
  Duration: 2 weeks
  Number of repetitions: 8
  
  This creates 8 Date markers named "2020 Quarter 2.1", "2020 Quarter 2.2", "2020 Quarter 2.3", etc.
  Scheduled one after the other.
  
  Nice to have:
  The first is "the master", so moving it will move all others. 
  The 2nd+ markers cannot be moved