Dates, Duration and Effort

A task bar on the board answers two independent questions, and Scheduler answers them from different Polarion fields. Where does the bar sit, and how wide is it? That comes from the work item’s date and duration fields, which you nominate in the widget’s Data Mapping parameters. How much work does the bar represent? That comes from one of Polarion’s estimate fields, chosen with the Plans Type parameter. Effort never resizes a bar that is already on the board — it drives the number printed on the card and the per-day load figures underneath it. The one moment effort does set a bar’s width is when you drop an item out of the Unplanned sidebar, described below. Keeping the two apart explains a board that looks contradictory at first glance: two tasks can occupy exactly the same three days and still produce completely different load, because their estimates differ.

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The Data Mapping Parameters

Scheduler does not assume which Polarion fields hold a task’s schedule. You tell it, in the widget parameter editor under Data Mapping: The values are field IDs — the technical IDs Polarion uses internally, not the labels shown on a work item form. A field displayed as “Planned Start” might have the ID plannedStart. Look the IDs up in Polarion’s Administration pages for the work item types your board queries.

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Set Exactly Two of the Three

The three parameters are not independent settings you fill in as completely as possible. Map exactly two of them, and the third is derived. Which two you map decides how Scheduler interprets and writes back a task’s schedule. Each combination is a complete, self-consistent way to describe a schedule, so pick the one that matches how your project already records dates:

• Start + End suits projects whose work items carry both dates as first-class planning data, and where nobody thinks in “this takes four days”.
• Start + Duration suits estimate-driven planning: a task begins on a committed date and runs for a known number of days.
• End + Duration suits deadline-driven planning: a task has to be finished by a fixed date, and its start is whatever the duration implies.

Writes follow the same logic. When you move a bar on the board, Scheduler saves the fields the active mode owns — the two dates in Start + End mode, or the anchoring date plus a recalculated duration in the two duration modes.

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Duration Is Counted in Working Days

When Scheduler derives one end of a bar from a duration — or recalculates a duration after you have moved a bar — it counts working days and steps over weekends. A three-day task starting on a Thursday therefore ends on the following Monday, not on the Saturday. This matches the timeline itself, which hides weekend columns by default. See Board and Timeline for the day grid and the timeline window. A duration of zero is treated as one day, so a task with an empty or zero duration still gets a visible one-day bar rather than a zero-width sliver.

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Effort: The Plans Type Parameter

Polarion work items can carry several time figures, and different teams plan against different ones. The Plans Type parameter — in the widget’s Work Items parameter section — decides which one Scheduler treats as the task’s effort: The third option has two refinements worth knowing:

• On an unresolved work item that has neither a Remaining Estimate nor any Time Spent recorded, Scheduler falls back to the Initial Estimate — so a task nobody has logged against still shows the effort that was planned for it.
• A resolved work item contributes zero effort, because there is no remaining work left to schedule against a resource.

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How Effort and Duration Show on a Card

Every task card ends with a right-aligned fields line. It carries the effort figure for the active Plans Type, rendered the way Polarion renders that duration field (for example 5d), followed by the work item’s status icon. In Remaining Estimate + Time Spent mode the line is a little richer: it shows the Remaining Estimate, then the combined figure in parentheses — so you can read the outstanding work and the total side by side on one card. Effort also has a visible consequence the moment you schedule something. When you drag an item out of the Unplanned sidebar onto a row, Scheduler sizes the new bar from that item’s effort: it converts the effort into whole days against an eight-hour day and rounds up. An item with no effort at all becomes a one-day bar.

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Effort Feeds the Load Heatmap

The per-day figures in each swimlane are effort divided across the days a bar covers, compared against that row’s capacity. That is why a wide bar with a small estimate barely tints its row while a short bar with a large estimate can push the same row over 100%. Capacity and Load covers the load markers, the four bands, and the capacity each kind of row carries.

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Changing a Task’s Duration

Task bars cannot be resized. There are no resize handles on the ends of a bar, and dragging near an edge moves the whole bar without changing its length — so a drag on the board can reschedule a task, but never lengthen or shorten it. To change how long a task takes, change the field the active mapping mode reads:

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See Also

• Board and Timeline — the day grid, the timeline window, and how far the board looks forward and back
• Capacity and Load — how effort becomes the per-day load figures and colour bands
• Schedule and Reschedule Tasks — the drag gestures the board supports, step by step
• Add the Scheduler Widget — placing the widget and filling in Data Mapping and Plans Type
• Widget Parameters — every parameter with its default