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Important note: EAP versions of Structure.Gantt are not full products. They are released early in the lifecycle to involve community in the product development. The feature set is incomplete and is being actively worked upon.

Missing some specific functionality? Tell us! There's a good chance the final product will have it.

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These are the Release Notes for Structure.Gantt EAP version 0.4. This is an intermediate version that we publish to demo the new features and get early feedback.

If you haven't played with Structure.Gantt 0.3, please start by reading Structure.Gantt 0.3 – Getting Started.

Please note that we didn't make this version go through a rigorous pre-release testing, as we did with version 0.3. There are some known bugs, and some unknown bugs are expected to be uncovered. However, as testing is a part of our overall development cycle, we expect this version to be stable. Production use is not recommended though.

Please let us know if you stumble upon any issues.

Note that there's a known issue with Oracle database – see below.

New Features in 0.4

  • Manual finish date
  • Visual indication of a manually scheduled task
  • Precision setting (1 minute / 1 hour / 1 day rounding)
  • Milestones (initial implementation)
  • Folder dependencies 

  • Basic story points support
  • Option to treat parent issues as either groups or tasks

See below for more information on each feature.

Installation

Structure.Gantt 0.4 supports only Structure 4.1 or later. JIRA 7.2 or later are supported.

During early development phase, we need to add a lot to the core Structure product, therefore it is expected that EAP versions will require the latest version of Structure.

Since this is a private preview release, Structure.Gantt is not available on the Atlassian Marketplace and should be installed via file upload (Administration | Add-ons | Manage add-ons | Upload add-on).

Important: Due to a known issue in Structure 0.4, if your JIRA runs on Oracle database, there might be problems creating a Gantt chart that is over 1,000 items. We'll have this problem fixed in the next EAP version.

Upgrading

If you upgrade from version 0.3, all Structure.Gantt data should be preserved. However, if you already have production data plans on Gantt, it would be wise to make a database or JIRA backup.

Please review your Gantt configuration after upgrading. First of all, there are new options. Secondly, please double-check that your preferred settings remain. Note that the default estimate in the Time Tracking session is changed to 1 hour; you might want to change it to your preference.

New Features in Detail

Manual Finish Date

Gantt Configuration now lets you select a custom field for the Manual Finish date. The field must have either a Date or Date/Time type. Using this option along with Manual Start Date, it's now possible to visualize a plan that is either created manually or imported into custom fields from some other tool.

Note that it's possible for issue fields to have Start Date, Finish Date and Duration at the same time. (Duration being derived from Time Tracking fields or from Story Points.) In such cases, Start Date and Finish Date take precedence, and estimates / story points are ignored. These values in these fields are not corrected to match Start / Finish dates.

Which fields are present in a particular issue also defines how user's gestures (moving and resizing the bar) are interpreted. The general approach is to update those fields that are present.

Visual Indication of a Manually Scheduled Task

If a task is manually scheduled, its bar on the chart will have a thick edge. You can tell which dates – start, finish or both – are fixed manually based on these edges.

Precision

There's a new configuration option, Precision. It may take value of 1 minute, 1 hour or 1 day.

Precision defines the minimal time unit that Gantt chart will work with. It has important effect on all calculations and the way information is read from JIRA.

Start Date / TimeStart date or date/time are rounded down to the nearest minute / hour / day boundary.
Finish Date / TimeFinish date or date/time are rounded up to the nearest minute / hour / day boundary.
DurationDuration, whether taken from Time Tracking field, or calculated from Story Points, is rounded up to the nearest minute / hour / day boundary.

Structure.Gantt will not correct or round the values in the original JIRA fields, unless the user starts changing the task with drag and drop. In the latter case, the affected values will be rounded.

Milestones

We have added the initial support for Milestones. You can plan using manually scheduled milestones, or see when milestones are reached with automatically scheduled milestones.

Currently, issues and folders can be milestones. Whether an item is a milestone is defined by an internal flag in Structure.Gantt. You can turn this flag on and off by clicking the Toggle Milestone button in the toolbar.

A milestone has no duration. It may have dependencies and be either manually or automatically scheduled.

Gantt Configuration allows you to set up a separate JIRA field that would store Milestone date for issues. You can use the same field for Milestone Date and for Start or Finish date for tasks. (Note that it's not currently possible to use Due Date field for that, but we intend to support it soon.)

If a folder is made a manually scheduled milestone, its date is stored internally by Structure.Gantt.

This is the initial implementation of milestones. We plan to have additional support for Milestones that would automatically identify issues as milestones based on their type or JQL.

Folder Dependencies

With this version, it is possible to create a dependency between folders or between folders and issues. Such dependencies cannot be expressed with JIRA links, so they are stored inside Structure.Gantt.

To create a dependency between a folder and task, use drag and drop on the Gantt chart in the same way you create dependencies between issues. To remove the dependency, click the corresponding arrow and select Remove on the information dialog.

The dialog for creating dependencies does not yet support folders.

If you're also using Structure.Pages, you can create dependencies between your Confluence pages, pages and issues, or pages and folders.

Basic Story Point Support

With version 0.4, you can tell Structure.Gantt whether you want the Duration of the task to be taken from Time Tracking field or from a selectable Story Points custom field. 

To convert Story Points into Hours, a simple configurable ratio is used (how many hours are in one Story Point – this could be a fractional number).

The configuration allows you to use both Time Tracking and Story Points as the information about duration. If an issue has both non-empty story points and time tracking information, Structure.Gantt picks either of the values, depending on the checkbox "Prefer Story Points over Time Tracking".

When the user resizes a task bar in the Gantt chart and both types of Duration are enabled, Structure.Gantt will always update either Story Points or Time Tracking, based on the "Prefer Story Points over Time Tracking" checkbox.

Parent Issues as Either Groups or Tasks

There's another option in Gantt Configuration, "Allow parent issues to be treated as groups", which governs how Gantt interprets when an issue has sub-issues in the structure.

If this option is on, the parent issue will become a group – for Gantt chart purposes it will act as a container that does not have its own duration or work.

If the option is off, the parent issue will be just another task in the Gantt chart. Only folders and other non-issue items will then be used as groups.

By default, the option is turned on.

Other Notes

This release has also other improvements. One notable improvement is that now, if there's a cycle of dependencies, it will be visible in the chart as red arrows, which the user can click and remove.

 

 

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