The correct way to link user story to tasks across teams

Question

Background

We have Developers, Designers and QA working on a single Jira board. Lately, we started using user story mapping to integrate the entire team into the planning process.

Problem

The difficulty is about finding an efficient way to link issues during planning and to make everyone understand what to work on first and what to wait for.

Example

During planning, our team creates a new user story "As a user, I want to register so that I can start enjoying services". We would then create a story named "Login page" and create additional sub-tasks for each dedicated teams like

* sub-task "Design UI for Login page" for designer team
* sub-task "Develop backend for Login page" for development team
* sub-task "Prepare Test cases for Login page" for testing team

Once the designer are done designing the Login page, they will transition its issue to done and notify the developers to start work on its frontend.

1st question: Correct way to link main story to  its dependent issues

I wonder whether the approach using story as main feature and its sub-tasks as jobs for each team to be the right approach, or should we actually create each as a separate issue and link them together?

2nd question: When to create sequential dependent issues

Once the designers are done, they will pass the issue "Design UI for Login page" to the developers for frontend development. But due to the naming of this issue, the developers cannot simply continue to use it, they actually need to create a new issue titled "Develop frontend for Login page" and then link it to the original "Design UI for Login page". This involves quite some manual work. There must be more efficient ways out there.

Could you share with us how you would solve this sort of organizational problems?

Nancy Corsi · Answer

I have the same question.

Brian Charniga_etpzhj · Answer

This is also a challenge I have faced in multiple organizations, however, I have never seen Atlassian-sanctioned guidance around this which is pretty frustrating. I can't help feel that Jira just doesn't have a great way to handle this scenario, which is why Atlassian is remaining silent.

In my current scenario, we also need to split out the work for dev / design / qa in order to properly track velocity of the dev team. We do not track velocity of the designers due to the fact that they are spread across multiple teams and not dedicated to one scrum team, so we have the need to create separate issues for each discipline.

Hélio Ricardo_5lvc5e · Answer

Hello. Did you get any insights or an answer on this topic? Thank you.