W9: Gantt Chart

This week we created our Gantt Chart for our project.

It was quite difficult to create it, because JIRA doesn’t have an option for creating a Gantt Chart, at least one that is free.

First, we had to export our sprints from JIRA into a CSV. Then we imported that file into Excel before we could use it in MS Project. This is because MS Project doesn’t recognize the date format of JIRA. But Excel could. It converted it automaticly into the german format, that our version of MS Project uses. But even this conversion wasn’t 100 % errorless. We had to manually readjust some dates, which hadn’t been recognized. Why?, we don’t know. Then we exported that Excel File into a CSV again. This new CSV was then imported into MS Project, where we had to manually match the CSV columns with the MS Project Columns so we could use the data. And at last we could finally create our Gantt chart.

So instead of JIRA->Gantt, we had to do JIRA->CSV->Excel->CSV->MS Project->Gantt.

In our opinion this isn’t how it should be done. JIRA and MSProject are two different tools intended for different purposes. And on top on that MSProject isn’t even able to recognize a different date format. There may be an option in MSProject to do that, but we didn’t find one. It is a professional tool, such simple things shouldn’t be a problem.

To conclude this post: We do not think that we should be forced to take on several steps for creating a simple chart with information already available in JIRA. In fact it should be done with a click of one or two buttons. Without any other external program or tool.

You can view our Gantt Chart here.