Is it possible to have an epic with subsequent stories falling on multiple boards?

[johnathan.flynn]

Hey everyone,

I'm a fairly new Jira user, and my company is currently in the middle of an Agile journey.  One current challenge is that we have different dev teams each with their own Jira board.  SW engineering, FW engineering, SW tools, System Test etc.  Each of these teams currently work on multiple projects simultaneously.

We'd like to carry a board with Epics (in our case new product features) on a 'Product Level' board, and then have subsequent user stories appear on multiple dev team boards.

Is this construct possible in Jira?  I imagine it's a challenge other companies have faced in the past.

Thanks for any help!

[Stuart Capel - London · Accepted solution]

Hi @johnathan.flynn 

Yes, this is possible. Issues (Jira term for epic / story / task / bug etc.) can belong to many boards.

When you create a project in Jira it will automatically create a board for you but if you click on the dropdown arrow by the board in the top left of the screen you can add more boards.

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/create-a-board/

[johnathan.flynn]

Hey @Stuart Capel - London thanks for the reply.  In our case I don't think that'd work.  Our headend SW dev team for example, at any given time they have resources allocated and working on probably 5-10 different projects.  So they already have an existing board, and they want the ability to pull different issues from project-level boards.

I mentioned we're in the middle of an agile transformation still so as we're piloting some aspects, our organization is setup for waterfall but we're getting teams used to packaging work into sprints and coordinating with each other to create demo-able increments.  Our 'Project' boards are going to be finite.  We'll pull XX features from a Product Backlog into a committed project and setup a Jira board.  Once that project is completed and launched, the project board isn't needed any more.  Individual dev teams have enduring boards though, and once they're done will pull in stories from other projects.

In Jira, since our dev teams have their own 'Project' boards, I think what I'm asking is if there's a way to share issues between multiple project boards.

[Stuart Capel - London]

You're welcome @johnathan.flynn the answer to your question 'is there a way to share issues between multiple boards' is definitely yes.

Each board uses a filter, made up of JQL (Jira query language), which is specified by default to bring back all the issues in the project it was created in. You can edit that filter to contain more projects. You can also filter by status, assignee, in fact with JQL you can specify any set of issues you can think of.

The link I referenced should show you how to do that. But essentially in the project you went to edit the board for you can go to board settings and change it from there