Questions regarding Next-Gen and issues faced

Question

Dear All,

We have been using Next-Gen for a while, and we see there has been added a lot of new exicting features, that we are now digging into using. Though we have run into some issues, and have some questions. And hope you all can help us.

We are using Kanban to do our planning, and while waiting for the Roadmap to be able to show start/due dates for issue types below an EPIC, we are turning to releases to control and show our status to customers and management/sales. And also we like the idea of the release notes etc. you get from this.

At the same time we want to have a better control of which tickets needs to be released. Therefore we have created a few new "TODO" issues statusses. BACKLOG, READY FOR PI, NEEDS REFINE and APPROVED. Before the development starts.

Now when we are sitting and doing our planning, we are using the Backlog view, and our idea was, to find all the issue types in status "READY FOR PI", and assign these to releases. Along with finding any issues without a release, and also assign these. And here comes the first issues.

1. We are not able to filter the BACKLOG view on status. Thus we cannot do a review of issues which have the status READY FOR PI. We have been using labels before, but it seems "wrong" to use a label for this. Is there a better way to do this planning?
2. If i want to find all issues which does not have a release, I am unable to see that is possible? Even in the issues view? I can select issues without an EPIC in the list, but not issues without a release?

To avoid the above bullet 2, to have to check if a release is added, it then turned to the workflow, and wanted to setup a rule, that when transition happens after READY FOR PI, then a release has to be added. Here comes another issue.

3. I don't see the possibility to add a rule based on the Release field on issues?

We might be going at this all wrong. Maybe there is a best practise somewhere, on how to use Next-Gen, both for Kanban and Scrum. We don't really run Scrum, we are more a Kanban team. But maybe the way we are doing planning etc. we should be using scrum?

I am happy to hear from you all, what you think.

Lars Olafsson_bp63ed · Answer

When i look at the backlog, it looks like it is desgined for exactly the purpose of having a list of releases on the left, and a list of issues on the right. And then drag/dropping them into the releases, and you can do some quick filters at the top. So it seems perfect for our purpose. 
You can even do it with EPICS, which was what we used for release before, to be able to use the RoadMap as a Gantt chart. Though we are missing the feature where we can show individual issue dates, and have them control the dates on the EPIC. Should be on the way though.

Lars Olafsson_bp63ed · Answer

Thanks Nic!

It might be becasue we are two co-founders working on this right now. And do not have a team yet. And we get a lot of requests from ourselves/sales/clients, that they want us to do. And we need to store these ideas somewhere, and then plan them into releases.

Is there a better way to achieve this with NextGen?

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Ok, so there's a slightly out-of-kilter process you've got going here.  You are not working in a Kanban way but using a tool built for Kanban, so while there's nothing wrong with what your doing, the tool doesn't quite do everything you want.

So:

* The backlog is not intended to be used like that.  If you have a process that has steps to go through before an issue is ready for the team to work on, then the backlog should not even be including those issues.  For a company-managed project, you could change the board filter so that it doesn't include things that are not ready to be in the team's backlog, but team-managed projects don't expect to have that complexity - if it's something the team will need to look at at some point, it goes into the backlog, and there's no way to filter it, because the backlog is a backlog - all items need some attention from the team.
* Search for "release is empty" or "fixversion is empty"
* Yes, Automations can pick up a change of field or status and perform actions when they happen.