How to manage issues that affect several projects

Patrick Dubois

Hello,

We need advice to setup an efficient way to manage the relationships between our libraries and projects. Let me give you an example. Say we have two libraries, Lib A and Lib B, each with its own JIRA project. Each lib has several Versions, each with different enhancement and bugs associated with it. Let's called these different versions A1 and A2 for Lib A and B1 and B2 for lib B.

Now we have project Gizmo which will use these two libraries. Gizmo has its own roadmap, with Version G1 and Version G2 planned. Version 1 will use A1 and B1 while version 2 will use the latest-and-greatest A2 and B2.

We'd like to be able to do a few things:

• Explicitly configure JIRA so that Version G1 of Gizmo is linked to Versions A1 and B1 of the libraries. In particular, that would mean that any library bug associated with A1 or B1 would be visible when looking at the Version G1 of the Gizmo roadmap. Any subsequent bug associated with A1 should also automatically show up in Gizmo G1 roadmap. Same thing with the Change Log Report.
• As a bonus feature: it would be great if we could selectively ignore some bugs from a library in the Project Gizmo context. For example, there's a bug in module foo of lib A1 but we don't care about that module, so let's ignore that bug somehow in Project Gizmo.
• When a new bug in a library is found, we need to proactively evaluate which projects are potentially affected and how. We need a way to log the results of that investigation for each project and track thre resolution progress.

Now from my limited experience with Jira, I see a few ways to do this:

• Use the Structure plug-in. Not sure to what extent it would work with our use cases. I'd like comments.
• Use the Multi Project Picker. Doesn't look like it supports the granularity (associate with versions) that we want. Also doesn't seem popular so extended support is questionable.
• Cloning issues. For each library issue that is created, we could also create a clone in each project that uses that library and create a link between them. That could work but seems quite labor intensive. Also the clones don't get automatically updated when the parent issue changes. This issue is raised in JRA-7948 (from 2005!?!).

Any suggestions to handle our use cases?

 

Thanks.

John Paz1

What a fun problem to work on!

My solution assumes that you are using JIRA Agile (Greenhopper), and instructs on how to create an Agile board to manage all of this.

1. Create a new Agile board.
2. Configure the board so the JQL query looks something like this:
   
   project in (Gizmo, Lib A, Lib B) AND version in (A1,B1,G1,A2,B2,G2)&nbsp;ORDER BY Rank ASC<br>
   This will give you all issue types, which may not be what you're looking for. But it gives you three projects and two versions to view from one Agile board. 
    
3. Change the card colors to queries, create three card colors and make each query point to a project:
   
   project = Gizmo / project = Lib A / project = Lib B<br>
4. For selectively ignoring bugs, create Quick Filters so you can toggle their view on and off. The query would look something like this:
   
   project = Gizmo AND issuetype = Bug<br>
   Name it "View/Hide Bugs" so others will know what the switch does.  

 

Let me know how it works out for you! Good luck!