I am seeking a simple way to proactively manage dependencies in Jira. Jira provides the ability to link stories together, which is great, but to enable teams to truly effectively manage dependencies, which is critical I think the following is needed. There may be another way, but here are my current thought needs:
1. For each story that is dependent upon another, I need the ability to set 2 dates. The 1st date is the date target date that the dependency needs to be resolved. The 2nd date is a critical date by which the dependency must be resolved to avoid a delay of my story to the next sprint. Note that when such a delay occurs for just 1 story is impacts the project program board.
2. Because multiple stories can be dependent on the same story and each of the dependent stories can have different target and critical due dates, I need the story they are dependent upon to automatically inherit the earliest target and critical due dates from the set of linked stories. This communicates to the team that owns the story that others are dependent upon the date by which others need them to complete their story, i.e. it informs the prioritization of their work. If they cannot meet the earliest date, slippage will occur.
3. The story that others are dependent up will also have it's own target date for completion. This exist today. Ideally when this date is later than the critical date of a linked dependent story alerts would be triggered.
4. As a User on a team with stories that others are dependent stories are linked to, I need a report that includes all of my team's stories that others are dependent upon. This report needs to include visibility to the linked dependent stories and the target and critical dates that they need the dependency resolved. Note: the # of dependent stories linked to a story also aids in prioritization. The more stories that could be delayed, the higher the priority.
5. As a User on a team with stories that are linked to stories that they are dependent upon, I need a report of all my stories that have dependencies. This report needs to show the story(s) that my stories are dependent on and the target date for completion of the dependency. This provides me with the information I need to understand which of my dependencies I need to be concerned about and if needed escalate against for an earlier dates, i.e. this facilitates management by exception. Just managing those stories that are at risk.
6. As a Program level user, I would need visibility to all teams dependency reports in a summarize view to enable effective management of dependencies at the program level across all teams. Ideally teams would communicate when they need help as part of the escalation process; however, often in large projects teams have too much to keep up with. The above set of reports provides the visibility that is needed to effectively manage team level and program level dependencies without having to spend hours upon hours repeatedly weeding through all stories one at a time.
I have never seen a tool that makes this fundamental process easy. I'm hoping that Jira or Confluence might at least be able to help to generate excel reports that can then be filtered to organize the information into something useful.
There may be a completely different way to do this. I appreciate any help with solving this problem that seems to impact all agile projects.
