Jira Cross-Projects versions

Question

Hey All

There is a use-case Im facing in my company to have a backlog from several projects in Jira. Lets say I have projects in (A1, A2, A3, A4 .... An)
And I want to have specific issues from these projects in one "place" something in Jira versions spirit.

In my example, lets consider I have this "version" and called it "cross-project backlog".

My filter for the Scrum board would be:

projects in (A1, A2, A3, A4, ..., An) and version = cross-project backlog

or just

version = cross-project backlog

I'm going to use this filter as my sprint backlog.

What's the problems?

The problem is very simple. The versions in Jira are project related, meaning any version from project A1 can not be used in project A2.

I did some research in the net and community as well and realized that the issue I'm facing is already discussed a lot.

I'm still trying to figure out the most efficient solution for my use-case.

So,

Suggestion to Jira staff:

Please, make it possible to have this solved in Jira asap :) . From technical point of view, I guess it should be easier to do :)

Question to Community:

Does anybody face this issue before/currently and how did you workaround the non-existing-solution ?

Thanks,

Arthur

Arthur Harutyunyan · Answer

Hi @John Dunkelberg  thanks for the answer.

Im still thinking that for this solution we wont need any add-on to be added, as it is very simple to implement on Jira side. At least they can implement a cross-project unique item (lets say, labels, components, etc) which I can assign my issues from different projects

And finally I can have a filter for cross-project issues. Easy!!

Thanks,

Arthur

John Dunkelberg · Answer

We wrote our own scripting solution specific to our internal versioning system.  That creates versions with the correct names in each project, but even then many interfaces of Jira will not recognize that two version objects that share the same name represent the same concept.  Fortunately some add-ons (such as Structure by ALMWorks) do have options so their features will string-compare the version names, rather than comparing the version objects.

As far as I know (and I'd be glad to be wrong) the Atlassian solution appears to be that you should buy Jira Align (now that it's replaced Portfolio) which I believe does provide some uniformity in populating versions.  I don't think that solve the reporting problem though.