Linking issues from parent project to child project

Question

Hello,

I am trying to setup the development of a hardware product on JIRA. The parent product is a box which has boards and a sensor (which is a child project). We want to use JIRA to track bugs so whenever an issue/bug is raised the relevant team is notified. For the boards I have added them into the components within the parent project and assigned a leader who looks after any issues on them. But for the sensor  which is a different project (child) in itself I cant find a suitable way to track issues. Essentially for the sensors what I would like to do is to raise an issue in the sensor project (child) using the board of the parent project (box).

The template I have used is Scrum and company managed project for the parent project.

Could you please suggest me how to do this/or if there is a better way of doing this.

Hans Polder_7ci2ta · Answer

Hi,

All valid reasons to have a separate project. This also allows you to customize workflows for the sensors to be different from the BOX project.

Basically, Jira does not allow for any ticket to 'look different' in a different board than in another board/project. An Epic is an Epic and will always look like an Epic in the entire Jira environment.

Let's go back a bit. In the end, you want the option to have a ticket in the SENSOR project that can be linked to an Epic in the BOX project.

Option 1: Do it manually. On the left, you see the BOX-1 ticket which is an Epic, and has 2 BOX Tasks (BOX-2 and BOX-3). On the right, you see the SENSOR project in which I am creating a Task manually, filling in the 'Parent' field as 'BOX-1'. It will then be shown as yet another child of the BOX-1 epic.

Option 2: We create an automation rule that allows people to create a follow-up task in the SENSOR project with information automatically copied from the BOX ticket. This will create a ticket in the SENSOR project with some information preset (for instance: I copied the labels from the Epic, made it child of the Epic in question, Assigned to 'Max Taylor' and copied the description from the Epic. Also, I set the summary as standard text + the Summary from the originating Epic. See below:

Above option is enabled by creating a manual-trigger Automation in your project (which you can tweak/setup to your liking):

Result:

Aliaqbar Husseni · Answer

The only reason why we want to track the sensor issues separately is because its a completely different project and has its own customers. The box uses the sensors and is a bigger project with its own customers. So its necessary for us to track the sensor issues separately.

I understand your point about the issue key. Cant we have a board within the box project which is linked to the sensor project. So if we raise a ticket as an epic in the box project its seen as a story in the sensor project with the box key.

Hans Polder_7ci2ta · Answer

Hey Aliaqbar,

Thanks for the additional information. It doesn't work like you describe. If a ticket is created in project BOX with component Sensor, it will get the issue key of the BOX project (BOX-123), and will therefore not show up in the SENSOR project. You can adjust the filters of a board to only show the BOX project issues with SENSOR components, but that's likely what you've been doing with the other BOX components.

Can you share a bit more about why you would want to have a separate project for the Sensor, but keep all the other components in the BOX project? I understand the physical 'parent/child' relationship, but I'm wondering what value it adds for you to have it in a separate project.

Regardless of above, you would still need an Automation Rule to create this 'follow-up' ticket for the Sensor team. In that automation rule, you can copy all kinds of values from the trigger ticket and do a whole bunch of cool stuff that could eliminate manual actions/chances of errors. This Automation Rule would just as well be able to create a follow-up ticket within the BOX project or within the SENSOR project, that hardly matters.