In Jira is it possible to have a gantt chart (or calendar view or similar) derived from your agile board?

Question

I'm very new to Project Management, Agile and similar. I just started trying out Jira to manage the work of a small dev team which clearly needs to become organized (right now they are keeping track of their tasks/issues/bugs on paper and e-mails, no recorded per task time estimates).

As a starter I planned to put all the open issues in Jira and have the team members give their time estimates for each issue, so I can be able to have a clearer overall view of the work they are doing and what needs to be done, and prioritize it.

Is there a plugin/tool integrated with Jira which can represent on a calendar or a Gantt chart the time the team is busy and the time issues are expected to last based on a work time map (work hours per day, work days...), task assignees and time estimates?

Don't know if it makes sense but I imagine working on an agile board (say the backlog) prioritizing tasks and having the team assign time estimates, and then from that visualize in a graphical way a self-updating projection of the issues over time, based on new "remaining time" estimates given by the team members.

If not Jira is there any software you would suggest which does something similar to what I'm looking for and do you think this approach does make sense in the first place?

This question could relate to Is there are a resource handler or gantt chart creator tool for JIRA?

Answer 1

What kind of method are you using? If you're using Scrum, keep in mind that you don't estimate by time, you decouple the real time from the effort required by using (story) points. These don't translate directly to time, so you can't map into the future. Scrum wants to gain planning experience by empirically measuring effort you've already invested, by measuring your actual team velocity in the past, not some fantasy of how the team might perform in the future.

If you do need estimates for larger future work, it helps if the team you're working with has already worked together for some time and on similar projects. Then you can use something like the worst case/best case estimates per epic as suggested by Mike Cohn in Agile Estimating and Planning.

If you're using some other agile method, I don't have enough real experience to give good advice. But it seems that in general in agile, Gantt charts may give a false picture:

Are Gantt diagrams compatible with Agile methods?