Sprint planning with stages and skills in Portfolio for Jira

[Thorsten Kamann]

Hello,

for one of my plans in Portfolio for Jira I have enabled Stages and Skills. I have enabled 2 stages (Specification and Realization). This works fine. I have for every story a part for specification and one for realization, separated through a sprint border.

Now I am getting my problem. If I plan a story for a dedicated sprint on my Scrumboard both parts in Portfolio (Specification and realization) are in the same sprint. 

How should I handle this? Are there any hints for this? Usually I plan the realization stage in my Sprints. Do I need to configure anything in portfolio?

Thanks

Thorsten 

[Thomas]

Hi @Thorsten Kamann,

Manual sprint assignments (made in Portfolio or directly in Jira) trumps all other rules for the algorithm, it is saying that this issue will happen during that time period.

There is currently no warning for this specific case and I would recommend using separate stories for each stage.

I understand your use case and it does make sense, and I think opening a feature suggestion would be best. Would you be able to describe how that interaction would ideally work for your team using stages and skills?

Cheers,

Thomas

[Thorsten Kamann]

Hello @Thomas,

thanks for your answer. But using different stories for specification and implementation is not a good solution. With this approach my backlog will be flooded with stories for the same user value.

If I could wish then I would like it similar to portfolio. In my timeline I see am additional information with the name of the stage (eg. XX-123 Topic of story (Specification)).

This I would like to see in my Sprint backlog, too. Additional to this information of the stage it were nice to have the storypoints visible this stage will take from estimation for the whole story.

Is this clear described and you can imagine how my perfect interaction could look like?

Thanks

Thorsten

[Thomas]

Not sure if that helps but it's possible to color the issues by stages.

From your comment I understand it would have more information on the timeline and scope table about the split of time spent between stages, which stage the issue is a part of, and virtually split issues with multiple stages to ensure (depending on the option) that they are not scheduled within the same unit of time (e.g. sprint).

Am I missing something or did I get something wrong?

[Thorsten Kamann]

No that isn't my intention of my comment.

I have an issue with the interaction between my Scrumboard and Portfolio. If I have stages in Portfolio (for instance 2 stages called Specification and Realization) and configured that there is a sprint border between them, then I can't add one of them (the part for the stage Specification or Realization) to a sprint on my Scrumboard. If I do this in Jira Agile than both parts are in the same sprint in Portfolio.

I would like to be able to add a story for a special stage to a sprint in my Scrumboard with the computed part of storypoints:

Scrumboard:
Sprint 1
XXX-123 Do some interesting stuff (Specification) 3SP

Sprint 2
XXX-123 Do some interesting stuff (Realization) 8SP

I hope that is a little bit clearer described from me :) 

As an alternative proposals how to handle a specification stage without adding a separate story are very welcome.

Thorsten

[Thomas]

I've created this feature suggestion: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JPOSERVER-2289 to track progress on that topic.

It seems to require some conceptual changes in Jira, Portfolio or both which makes it a non-trivial piece of work.

If you have other workarounds, idea and use cases feel free to add those to the suggestion (in the comments) to help the team prioritize and implement it.

Cheers,

Thomas

[Thorsten Kamann]

Any news to this topic?