How to best track UX debt across projects

Question

Our organization has a lot of UX/design debt across our product teams. Currently, we're using a spreadsheet as a centralized place to track UX problems and then converting them into issues on JIRA. The main value of the spreadsheet has been that we can maintain an overview of the total number of UX issues even after an issue has been marked as "Done" or "Will not fix".

I'd like to know if it's possible to do similar tracking in JIRA. My initial idea of how it might work is that a separate UX project is created where we log all the UX issues across the organization. Then these stories are somehow sent/linked to the backlogs of their respective projects so that when a team changes the status of the issue (to Done or Will not fix, etc.) the main UX project is still able to track those issues.

Any thoughts on what might work are much appreciated!

unknown · Answer

Thanks for your answer, Andy! I'll take it back to my team and we'll explore it further.

Andy Heinzer · Answer

Hi Melanie,

I see that you are looking to create issues within Jira in order to track issues on the topic of UX that might span across several projects.  While I can understand the thought process here to try to first create all these issues into a single project and then create linked issues in the appropriate project, I would actually caution against this approach.  The main reason being is that this duplicates the issue creation within Jira and in turn requires you to find a means to link these issues to their other issues across projects.  And then from there you would probably have an expectation that Jira would some how sync the status between these linked issues across projects.  It might be possible to set it up this way, but it tends to overly complicate the situation in my personal opinion.

Instead I think the better solution is to simply create these issues once, with each issue in their appropriate projects.  When these issues are created, I would recommend using a label or possible some other custom field.  By adding a particular label to all of these created issues, it makes it much easier to later track these issues via Jira's JQL, even across projects.  Let's say for example that all issues imported by this process included a label name of "ux" (without quotes) for all the issues about UX, then you could simply create a JQL filter such as

labels in (ux) ORDER by Rank ASC

Then save this filter.   From there, you can create a new board and use that saved JQL filter for that new board.  This would let you see all those issues, even if they exist in other projects (provided that your account has permissions to see those issues, and the board's columns are setup to show all statuses these issues can have).  And you can still run reports within Jira, based off that board and its filter.  So this way you should still be able to easily see how these issues progress in one place, without creating duplicate issues that might have different ownership/assignee which in my view complicates how you manage these issues within Jira.

I hope this helps.

Andy