Dependency and progress for roadmaps in Jira Software Cloud

The roadmap feature in Jira Software Cloud's NextGen templates is getting a bit of an upgrade. In the new version we have two new features and soon we will get one of the features I am waiting for most.

In this new update for Jira Software Cloud we get two new features. Dependencies allow you to quickly link two epics together to indicate that they are dependent on each other. This is a great feature that allow you to visualize dependencies in your timeline.

The second feature is to indicate progress for child issues. This is shown below the epic name in the different status colors: grey, blue and green. This is not really as useful as if you could drill down on the items themselves in a hierarchy as you can in Portfolio for Jira. Still it is useful to quickly get a glance of the current status of things.

In the next version we will see the addition of roadmap hierarchies. This will allow us to open up the child issues so we can see them in the tree. Unfortunately the child issues does not seem to be shown in the same way and in the first iteration we only seem to get this for one level of the tree. Sub-tasks will not be seen in the hierarchy as it looks right now.

I feel that this is a step in the right direction, but I am concerned about the fact that the road map feature only exist for Cloud users and even more so that it is only available for NextGen projects. The features are much wanted and if we can get a good transition of Portfolio for Jira to a simpler and more useful tool, then I think that will be a great selling point.

For this to to be a replacement for Portfolio for Jira, which is positioned a bit between Jira Align and Roadmaps, then we need to be able to select what level we want to use and we need to be able to extend the parent child hierarchy with new levels. Using Epics in this way kind of annoy me since we are clearly working with features here rather than epics.

It will be interesting to see if Roadmaps will remain a cloud only feature and how it will fit next to Jira Align and Portfolio for Jira in the future. For now I am enjoying the new feature and look forward to the next upgrade.