One Project, 3 Boards, 3 Sprints, Linked Issues

[Laxminarayan Pimpdae]

I created a project namely 'Project A' and in that project, I created 3 scrum boards named as,

1. Design Board

2. Development Board          and

3. Testing Board.

The filter for all the boards is the same (project = PRO ORDER BY Rank ASC)

But, each board has its own specific set of columns and statutes and the board settings page has a warning which states "Some issues in the Saved Filter will not be shown on the board. View unmapped statuses which contain these issues."

I have added a new issue type 'Initiative' above Epics and created all the required issues accordingly. All these issues do of-course have their statuses as 'To Do' when created and the first board 'Design Board' is the only one which has the status 'To Do' in it's sprint column. 

Now, the flow of story intended was - a story named "story1" passes though the sprint column of the Design board first and when it reaches the last column(Done) of that board, the Development board lead(also me) will pick it from there, create a new story in that same epic and link this story issue with the Design issue of the same story and then adds this newly created design issue linked story to the Development board sprint. 

But here, I am unable to view the issues created in Development board unless they match any of the column statuses. Is there a way to achieve the above flow ?

OR the flow can be as simple as

A story gets created, the story points are given for the first sprint in Design board. The story gets done, the story points are achieved and recorded for that particular sprint and then the story moves to the Development board's backlog. From that backlog, the Development board sprint is created and the story is added to the sprint for development along with new story points. The story is done in the development board and moves on to the Testing board backlog similarly and eventually gets done. 

Thank you.

[Bill Sheboy · Accepted solution]

Hi @Laxminarayan Pimpdae -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

I respectfully suggest having a conversation with your team's scrum master or agile coach about how you are managing work, what reporting you need, and what problems you are trying to solve by organizing as you describe.  They may give you ideas for alternatives to organizing and boards/workflows to help.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Laxminarayan Pimpdae]

Hi @Bill Sheboy 

Thank you for the response. 

Regards,
Laxminarayan

[Laxminarayan Pimpdae]

It has been a year or so that I have posted this question and over the days I was able to comprehend the issue with this and build a more practical setup and achieve what was conceived. It was a good learning curve. 

All thanks to the community. Cheers! 

[Sam Nadarajan]

Hello @Laxminarayan Pimpdae, welcome to the Community!

There's not a way to achieve the initial flow you described, where you create the development story and it appears in the development backlog given your current setup. When you create a new Jira issue the initial status will be the initial status of the workflow associated with the issue type. In this case, because your initial status is "To Do", then every time you create a new issue, it will initially have the "To Do" status. Because the "To Do" status is mapped to a column on the Design board and not the Development board, to view the newly created development story you would have to go to the Design board's backlog.

You could:

1. Set up an automation rule that looks for newly created development stories (however that is categorized in your instance) and auto-transition it through the workflow until it gets to the status mapped to your Development board's backlog, OR
2. Create different issue types for Design, development, and testing stories, then have separate workflows attached to each of those issue types. The initial status for Design (To Do) would be mapped to the backlog of the Design board, the initial status for Development (???) would be mapped to the backlog of the Development board, and so on for Testing. With this approach, whenever you create an issue with type "Development", it will appear in the Development backlog.

Daisy chaining boards in Jira gets complicated quickly, and ideally if you can avoid/minimize its use you'll have less administrative complexity. Instead of having a single workflow spanning multiple boards to reflect different phases of your development lifecycle, I'd suggest having different workflows with different issue types for each of those phases, OR have the design Jira issue flow through the Development/Testing boards as is (your second suggested solution, not sure if you need/want to preserve story point estimate history).

Hope this helps

[Laxminarayan Pimpdae]

Hi @Sam Nadarajan 

Thank you for responding. 
From what I learned, now, I would really want to avoid one single elongated workflow throughout multiple boards in a single project. Also, it would be really helpful if you could provide a guide or a structure to having multiple boards (Design, Development and Testing) in one single project where issues move from one board to other. 
Thank you.

Regards,

Laxminarayan