Make a Software Project Timeline

A software project timeline shows how a piece of software gets from an idea to a release: the phases of the work, roughly how long each one takes, which ones wait on others, and the dates the team is working toward. It gives developers, designers, testers and stakeholders one picture of the plan, so it's easy to see what is happening now, what is coming next, and whether the release date still holds.

It sits between a roadmap, which shows several projects over the next few quarters, and the task board or issue tracker the team works from every day. The timeline shows the shape of one project. The tracker holds the individual tickets.

The usual phases

Every team works a little differently, but most software projects pass through the same phases:

Discovery: agree on the problem, the requirements and what is out of scope.
Design: sketch the user experience and plan the architecture.
Development: build the software, often in sprints of one or two weeks.
Testing: check that it works, fix what turns up, and test again.
Beta or staged rollout: release it to a small group of users first.
Release: launch it to everyone.
Support: fix the issues that come up in the first weeks and plan what comes next.

Keep the timeline at the level of phases and sprints. If you list every ticket, it stops being readable at a glance. Timeline vs Schedule explains where that detail belongs.

Building one in Preceden

Create a timeline and pick the Gantt Chart layout under Choose an initial layout. It lists each event's name down the left, which suits a plan with many pieces of work of different lengths. Creating Gantt Charts with Preceden has more on that layout.

Rename the starting layers by clicking their names in the list below the timeline, then use the Add Layer button above the timeline to add more. A layer for each workstream works well, such as "Design", "Backend", "Frontend" and "QA", because it shows which parts of the work run in parallel. If the team works as one group, a layer for each phase works too. Either way, you end up with a swimlane timeline.

Add each phase or sprint as an event and choose its layer from the Layer menu. You can give an event an end date, or type a duration such as 2 weeks as the end date instead. To leave weekends out, type 10 weekdays and Preceden skips Saturdays and Sundays when it works out where the event ends. Supported Date Formats lists everything Preceden reads.

For a run of sprints, add the first one, then click its name, change the dates and the name, and click the Duplicate button at the bottom of the form. The copy gets the new dates and the original keeps its own. Duplicate an Event has the details.

Link the work that waits on other work

Testing can't finish before development does, and the release waits on the beta. Open the later event, check Dependent, and choose the event it starts after from the menu. Its start date then follows that event's end date, so if a sprint runs a week over, everything that depends on it moves with it, as long as those events have a duration rather than a fixed end date. Dependent Events explains how it works.

That turns the timeline into a quick answer to the question every software project gets asked: if this slips, when do we ship?

Mark the release dates

Under More Options in the event dialog, check Make this event a milestone on the few dates the whole project works toward, such as the design sign-off, the code freeze, the beta and the release. Preceden draws a milestone as a full-height vertical line, so every workstream can be read against it. Make a Milestone Timeline has tips on choosing them.

Track progress during the project

As the work moves along, pick a Percent Complete value (also under More Options) on each phase or sprint to shade how much of it is done. To compare the plan with today, click the Appearance button above the timeline, open the Axis section and check Display a line on today's date. Preceden draws a red vertical line at today's date, so anything unfinished to the left of it is running late. Appearance Settings - Axis covers the other axis options.

Our Pro plan lets you invite collaborators, such as the leads for each workstream, who can update their own events. To keep stakeholders or clients informed without letting them edit, share a link so they always see the current plan, or save it as a PDF or export it to PowerPoint for a status meeting.

The free plan allows up to 10 events on each timeline, which is enough for a phase-level overview. A plan broken into sprints usually needs more, and our paid plans lift the event limit.