Jira - links between user stories

Question

Dear all,

I have a situation to discuss - we got multiple source projects from where we pick few userstories marked with a label/component. We pick these uerstories and work on them.

The problem is, within the planned release, these source projects keep on making changes to these user stories anytime (For eg: they can move user stories to next release or add more user stories.)

We want to be updated about these changes so that we can also act accordingly. Also, our  completion timelines are different from the source projects.

I want to know, how we can handle these user stories in such a way that, we keep on getting information about their updates, but our completion dates do not impact their user story closures.

I was thinking of creating a task under their marked user stories so that if they make any changes we get to know about them and then have a separate workflow for our tasks so that our task status do not impact their sprint closures and reports in Jira.

Is this option feasible? Any other way to handle this situation.

Thanks!

Anupriya Tyagi · Answer

Hi Julian,

1) We do not have a Jira project yet but we are going to create one. But these source project exist.
We work on the content creation of the user stories being developed on by the source projects. Not all the user stories which are in development or testing needs content creation. Few of them which will be labelled as ‘content creation required’ will be in our scope. There will be multiple projects in Jira from where we will pick these user stories. 
I am not sure if cloning these user stories to our project will be the most feasible option (please suggest).

2) Destination project will be our project which does not exist yet.

We want that if these user stories gets updated in source, they get updated in our destination project as well but our destination workflow does not impact the closure of the stories at the source end because our content creation of these stories is independent of its development or testing.

Is it possible somehow?

Julian Governale · Answer

I'm not sure I fully follow your question but can you answer a few questions to help clarify more?

* What do you mean by pick one and work on it?  
* Where is the work done against the picked user stories? Destination project?
* Are you cloning these users stories from the source project into your project?
* If not cloning, are you just including these source user stories from the source project in your project (i.e. Source user story issue key is sourceProject-1 and the issue key in your project still showing sourceProject-1)?

For getting updates:

* You can watch the issues in the source project to get updates on the issue.  This works as long as your notification scheme on the source project sends updates to the watchers

To me it sounds like you are including the source user stories in your project (question 4) and what is happening is the user story is not actually going through your project workflow, but the source project workflow and when they make changes in the source project, you see it reflected in your project