Is it possible to automatically schedule issues based on a final deadline?

[Sami Mikkola]

We have a standard process in use at our company and we have a project template with about 300 issues. We also have allocations for the issues on how long each issue takes to complete. We always know the final deadline date (release) about 6 months in advance. Now we are looking for a solution to automatically schedule all the tasks in the project based on the release date. 

For clarification lets say that there's an epic called "Step 1" and its length is 14 days. Under that Epic we have 10 tasks. Then we have Step 2, which takes 30 days, and it starts right after Step 1. We know that Step 1 has to start 100 days before "Release". And we know, that Release starts on March 1st, 2025.

Now we would want an automation or solution to schedule Step 1 and Step 2 based on the date we insert in Release. How could this be accomplished? Thanks for all the help and ideas!

[Lisa Forstberg]

Hi @Sami Mikkola

Welcome to the community!

I think I understand what you want. You have a finish to start relations between all the Epics (Epic 1 to Epic 2 and so on)  that should be used for calculating the "next Epic". Then the children should follow their parent?

I am a little bit curious to know more about how you then will use it when all the dates are set? Is it for viewing the scope in the Timeline view of the project perhaps? 

A couple of questions first:

• When you say "automatically schedule", you mean set both start date and due date on all issues (Epic and Children to Epic) or only a due date for each issue?
• I see you are on Standard Plan, do you have any addons in your environment?
• Do you have a custom field on the Epic called Release Date or are you connecting the Epic to a Fix version that has the release date defined? 
• Are the Epics linked with specific links to each other in your template?

Should be possible with an automation but you may need to work out a small checklist for initiating such a project. You need to figure out when to trigger the automation as it seems like all issues needs to be created in the project before triggering the automation.

I found a few similar topics to be inspired from:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Automation-rule-to-update-custom-date-field/qaq-p/1653209

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Set-subtask-due-dates-based-on-variable-offset-custom-field/qaq-p/2714487

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Service-Management/Set-Date-with-Automation/qaq-p/2526195

and documentation about use of smart values in automation 

Best regards

/Lisa