Spotlight on Spira 6.14 - Inline Editing on Gantt Charts

November 22nd, 2021 by inflectra

waterfall methodologies gantt traditional projects

The next release of SpiraTeam and SpiraPlan includes some major enhancements for planning and managing waterfall and/or hybrid projects. We introduced the new Gantt chart views of Releases and Tasks in Spira v6.5 with the ability to simply view the Releases and Tasks as items in a read-only Gantt chart view. In the upcoming release, we have added inline editing capabilities, so you can edit Releases and Tasks in the Gantt chart views, and also edit the Releases in the Pert hierarchical view as well.

Inline Editing on the Task Gantt Chart

The Task Gantt chart in the new version of Spira allows you to click on any of the tasks in either the left-hand side hierarchical tree of releases and tasks or on the green task bars displayed in the actual timeline view and display a popup dialog containing the various task fields as well as the option to add a new comment to the task.

Similarly, if you click on any of the blue release bars on the schedule-timeline or the release items in the left-hand hierarchical tree, the system will display a corresponding edit release dialog box that will let you edit any of the release fields or add a comment to the selected release.

You can also select any of the releases (or phases/sprints) in the left-hand side hierarchical tree (so that their background is highlighted in light green) and then choose the option to add a New Task, this will bring up the New Task dialog box that will let you add a new task under the selected release, phase or sprint:

Note that you cannot add a new release of this page, that can only be done on the updated Release Gantt Chart that we will be discussing next...

Inline Editing on the Release Gantt Chart

The new version of Spira has made several changes to the Release Gantt Chart, including the ability to choose the display release on the page (previously it was read-only), and the ability to add and edit releases directly on this page:

If you click on any of the blue release (or sprint/phase) bars on the schedule timeline or the release items in the left-hand hierarchical tree, the system will display a corresponding edit release dialog box that will let you edit any of the release fields or add a comment to the selected release.

To add a new release, phase, or sprint, simply click on the dropdown menu Add Release and choose which type of release you would like to add:

Release (major or minor)
Sprint (formerly known as an Iteration)
Phase

Once you have made the selection, the appropriate release dialog box is displayed:

The dialog box will let you enter any of the release fields as well as add a new comment (if allowed by the workflow).

Inline Editing on the Release Pert Chart

Finally, for completeness, the new version allows adds the same inline release editing capabilities to the release mind map (also known as Pert chart) view of releases:

When you click on the name hyperlink on any of the release, phase, or sprint items, the same edit release dialog box is displayed, with the ability to edit the various fields as well as add a new comment:

With these features now available, all of the Gantt chart views and mind-map views support inline editing. Our future plans for the views will be to add additional interactivity, such as adding dependencies and associations and dragging the Gantt bars to change the dates dynamically in the schedule view.