Setup Basic Gantt Chart

Modified on Thu, 21 Jul 2022 at 03:38 PM

NOTE:

This page describes how to setup your own gantt report, it is fairly simple. If you are evaluating Nextedy GANTT, you can also install a demo project with preconfigured gantt. In such case open Polarion Administration > Nextedy GANTT > Setup

We’ve prepared an article that will help you configure a basic Gantt Chart based on an ‘E-library’ template.

It shows the creation of a Gantt with this template, so you have an opportunity to repeat our steps to receive the result on the screenshot below.

As a result, you will see the work items as Gantt tasks next to the Table view.

Let’s start with creating a new project.

Select the E-library template from the list and finish the creation of the project.

When your project is created, let’s already create your first Gantt Chart.

Open ‘Documents & Pages’, and select a Space for it. You can create your Gantt in any existing Space or create a new one. In this tutorial, we will use the ‘Default Space’.

Click on ‘Default Space’ and ‘Expand Tools’ on the upper side of the screen.

Click on the Gear button - Create New.

Choose Info Page.

Come up with a Title. Name (ID) will be added automatically.

Now it loads an empty page ready for your configuration. As you can see, the Info page GANTT1 is already added to your Default Space. On the right side, there’re different Widgets.

There are 2 widgets available to create a Gantt Chart:

Work Items Gantt - exposing Polarion Work Items as items on Gantt;
Plan Gantt - exposing Polarion Plans as items on Gantt;

The Gantt widget is available at "Work Items Gantt" in the "Work Items" category.

(The "Plans Gantt" is accordingly under the "Plans" category")

For this example, we will use Work Items Gantt. So let’s select ‘Work items’ from Widgets and then Gantt (Work Items).

As you can see, it loads all work items that exist in that E-library template.

But in many cases, we don’t need to see all work items on one Gantt.

In case, if we need to see only one type of Work Item, we can do it by clicking on ´Type´ in Gantt Widget Parameters. Just select the desired type and click on the ´Apply´ button to see the changes.

In our case, we would like to show only Epic and Release types. We can do it by using ‘Query’. Add a new query by clicking on the ‘+’, and then select ‘Type’. After that, you will be able to choose the types of work items.

Choose the types we’ve already discussed above. To see the changes click on ‘Apply’.

Now let’s move to the end of Gantt Widget Parameters and open the ‘Advanced’ section. Choose ‘Yes’ in Maximize Gantt View and Apply the changes. After that Gannt will be set to Full Page mode.

Let’s move to the ‘Load Children’ section. It defines how many levels of child items should be shown. By default, it equals zero (0) and means that no additional items are shown. Let’s change it to 1 and apply the changes.

As you can see nothing changed because we still haven’t configured parent-child roles between work items.

Parent Role.

The hierarchy of items on the Gantt chart is derived from work item links.

Select what Work Item link roles should be used to detect the parent-child relationships. If empty, no hierarchy is shown.

For example, the parent role that goes from Epic to User story is ‘has parent’. Let’s add it to the Gantt. Click on ‘Select..’ and add a parent role from the left list to the right, then click Ok.

Now you see that it loads User Stories as children of Epic work items. But if you put ‘0’ again in ‘Load Children’, that relation will be hidden.

But what if we also would like to see the child items of the User story?

In this case, we will create a parent-child relationship from the User story. It implements its children, that’s why we add one more parent role ‘Implements’.

If you apply changes right now, you will see no changes. That’s because we load only 1 level of child items. But as we need to load children of User Story, which is a child of Epic, we should increase the number of child levels to load to 2.

Now you can see that it loads 2 levels of parent-child roles. Epic - User story - Task.

But as you see, every User Story has many Tasks, so we can hide Tasks from the Gantt, just to make it look better. Let’s set ‘Load Children’ back to 1.

Dependency Role.

The dependency links are also derived from the work item links.

Select what Work Item link roles should be used to detect Depends-on relationships. If empty, no dependencies will be shown.
If you select multiple link roles, the first valid link role is used when creating new links.

For our example let’s add the ‘depends on’ link from the list.

You can see that between some of the work items appeared a red-dotted background, which happened because some of the Work items depend on others. And as we still didn’t schedule them, Gantt says us, that it may have planning issues. No worries, we will change it later.

Work Item Types Configurations

You will also need to be able to create new work items right from the Gantt Chart.

To do this, we will complete ‘Work Item Types Configurations’.

In our project, we have 3 main work items: Release, Epic, and User Story. The Release has a milestone type because it has no duration, it’s just a one-time event.

Let’s start with the Release work item.

From the list ‘Item Type’ select Release;
In Gantt Presentation More select (Only date, zero duration);
Click ‘Yes’ on Enable Create New;

The Epic derives its schedule from the child's work items and allows to have a parent, but only of the same type.

From the list ‘Item Type’ select Epic;
In Gantt Presentation More select ‘Derived Schedule (Schedule comes from children);
Click ‘Yes’ on Enable Create New;
Select Parent Mode - in our case, we allow to create parent for Epic Work item, but only with the same type - Epic.

User Story has representation mode of Item, and let’s enable to create new.

As a child of Epic work item, it allows having a parent of Epic type.

Table View

Table View is a part of the Gantt Chart on the left side. For this moment you see only one column ‘Item’. Let’s have a look at our Gantt Parameters.

Let’s create a new column. When you click on ‘Field’ it opens a list of Gantt fields, that can be added to the table.

For this example, we will add a Start Date field. Choose it from the list, give it the label ‘Start’ and click on Apply.

As you can see, all your tasks have a start day, which is the same as ‘Today’, because we didn’t schedule the tasks on Gantt yet.

Please note, that these fields are related to Gantt settings, not to the settings of Work Items.

When we want to add some information from the settings of work items to the Table view, we select the ‘Other (by ID)’ option.

Let’s add a ‘Status’ column to the table. The field ‘Status’ relates to work items settings, so we have to choose the ‘Other (by ID)’ option, write down the ID of the work item, and set the rest of the parameters.

We’ve already added all the parameters we need, so let’s save the changes by clicking on the Save icon in the upper-left part of the screen.

Now we are ready to make our Gantt look nice and organized.

It’s time to see how to schedule tasks on Gantt. Click on the Edit button to start.

All your items are still unscheduled, you can see it by hovering over each item with your mouse.

Depending on a status of a task, you can move it left or right.

As we can see the first Release task is already published, so we understand that it was somewhere in the past. Let’s drag it to the left side.

The next one has a ‘Feature freezed’ status, so we understand that it still may happen somewhere in the future. Drag it somewhere to the right side. Do the same with the last one Release, and drag it somewhere near the previous one. After that save the changes.

Now let’s schedule one of the Epics.

As you can see, some of its User stories are already completed, but some are still in progress. Let’s move left all verified tasks, as we understand that they happened somewhere in the past. You see, that parent is also moving left, that’s because it has derived schedule, which we did before. So no matter how long the children's tasks will be, their parent will cover all of them.

You can also change the duration of tasks. By default, all of them are scheduled for 10 days, but you should change it depending on your needs.

On both sides of a chosen task, you will see little white dots, which you can hover with the cursor and drag left or right to make your task longer or shorter.

Change the duration of the first task to 5 days by dragging little white dots, and then repeat it with the rest of the tasks. Then save the changes. You will get something like that:

As it’s just a sample Gantt, so it doesn’t really matter much how long each task will take, but for your own project, you will set it depending on the task’s specification and complexity.

Now our tasks are scheduled, but they still look a little bit messy. We can make look it better by changing the sort method.

By default, they are sorted by ID, but it doesn't give us much information. That’s why we will change it and sort it by gantt_start. So we will see all tasks from the nearest starting day to the latest.

To do it, open ‘Gantt Widget Parameters > ‘Sort by’ and change it from ID to gantt_start. Apply it and save the changes. Now you can see the tasks nicely sorted.

One more thing we wanted to show in this article is dependency links between tasks. As you remember, when we added a Dependency role between work items, some of them got the red-dotted background. You don’t see it now, because we decided not to load Tasks into the Gantt. But let’s load them and check, how we can fix it.

Change the Load Children from 1 to 2 and apply the changes. Now we see that background again.

Save changes and enter the Edit mode.

The Tasks are unscheduled and between some of them, there are dependency links. If you cover them with your mouse, it writes that ‘Dependency constraint violation’.

If you zoom them in, you see, that from the end of the last Task links go to the start of 3 others.

"finish_to_start" dependency link means that the target task can't start before the source task ends (but it may start later).

There are some other dependency options:

"finish_to_start" - the target task can't start before the source task ends (but it may start later).

"start_to_start" - the target task can't start until the source task starts (but it may start later).

"finish_to_finish" - the target task can't end before the source task ends (but it may end later).

"start_to_finish" - the target task can't end before the source task starts (but it may end later).

In our case we have to schedule them the way, so the first task ends before the others will start, and the rules wouldn’t be broken.

It helps to keep your tasks in order, so your team will be always aware of the task’s dependencies when working with them.

As you see now everything looks nice and organized.

That was the basic Gantt configuration, now you can try some configuration options on your own in this project, or start already creating your own perfect Gantt Chart!