How do you track and show work without fix versions?

Question

We went from quarterly to monthly releases and had a great fix version convention. The team wants to move to continuous releases twice a week and think fix versions will be tedious to maintain.

i need it to track progress against time/milestone and visualize in a roadmap view to answer what’s going out, around when, are we on track or not.

It’s nice to monitor all tickets in a version and easily follow up on something. Would love to hear how continuous delivery teams show this info to management. Thanks!

Danut M _StonikByte_ · Answer

Hi @Bea Tea,

It looks like you team now follows a Kanban approach, when you release when something is ready to be released, maybe multiple times per day.

You could use a Jira dashboard like the one described is this article to track the work of your team.

Danut.

Jens Schumacher_3blqvj · Answer

Hi @Bea Tea

I'm glad to hear that your team is looking to move to continuous releases. This is a great way to improve the speed and quality of your software development process. But as you pointed out, it does come with its own challenges.

First of all, I think it's completely acceptable to keep using versions. It does add a bit of overhead when you are releasing twice a week, but you can keep it fairly lightweight. I've seen versions used in that context by many other teams.

If the team insist on not using versions, I do recommend the use of Epics to group smaller tasks into larger pieces of work. An epic should be large enough to be a significant undertaking, but not so large that it is impossible to complete in a reasonable amount of time.

Using Epics combined with Roadmaps will give you visibility into the progress of these larger pieces of work.

For smaller pieces, the Kanban board will provide an overview of what is shipping throughout the week.

Would love to hear what solution you end up using. We've been looking into the different ways of how teams work to help teams better communicate changes with https://released.so

Yuri Lapin _Release Management_ · Answer

Hi @Bea Tea

Trust you are well

Nice to hear you are moving towards continuous delivery. We are developing Release Management Apps for Jira but we also eat our own dog food. Thus, we also do continuous delivery and deliver apps to production every week/twice a week.

Fix versions becoming tedious in this case only if you try to plan upfront. The way we do it is the following:

* do not plan upfront
* have "XYZ - Next" fix version for all our Apps
* as soon as we are happy to deliver we trigger the pipeline
* CI/CD servers after the deploy to prod calls our Rest API to change "XYZ - actual version/build number"
* all the not completed stories/tasks are moved to "XYZ - Next" automatically.

Thus you have tracking and control fix fix versions w/o tedious work. Yes, there's some work through for DevOps to make this automation to happen.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Yuri.