Where does Discipline fit in a Matrix organisation Jira Setup

Gwilym Hughes

Hi Jira,

We have a hybrid matrix organisation - this sounds posh, but it means we have a group of people who work in disciplines, one of which are a sepcific type of coders (ill call them just coders for clarity), some of the people who practice this discipline work in a group doing general code issues on our live site, others are assigned to specific projects (let’s call these games to make the difference between Jira Projects and actual projects).

All code work needs to be deployed in a certain way, and QA’ed. Therefore it needs to follow a workflow. Also it is good to have all the deployment stuff in one place for our release manager – as versions don’t work across projects.

As such, I think we need Jira Projects based on disciplines (e.g. Coders Project), and use Epic’s to link Game Features across different disciplines.

But then, if we want to do sprint planning on a Game feature that has a multi-discipline group, we can’t break it down in one project, as we need to have it across multiple projects (each discipline in their own project). So then I think we need different Projects in Jira based on Games, and link the Disciplines with components – but that won’t work as projects in Jira can have different workflows.

I guess then, my question is, how do you enforce disciplines to have set workflows across projects, should I separate the deployment from the work or is there another solution to this?

Thanks, and let me know if you need more info!

G

Remigiusz Jacko

As I understand, disciplines are group of people working on different things:

• Coders - creating game code in C#
• Support - resolving bugs
• Webmasters - resolving bugs on webpage (not in games)
• Artist - making renders and textures

You want to make different workflows for issues worked on different groups. You can create custom type of issue (like bug, task, improvement) to name them (like code, support, webmastery, arts). To set different workflow for every issue type do this:

Create Issue type. Administration -> Issues -> Add Issue type -> "Code", "Support", etc.

Go to Administration -> Issues -> Workflow Scheme -> Add new scheme.

Edit it -> Add existing workflow -> pick extended workflow -> select "Code" type.

Add another wokflow, extend, select "Support" type.

To have standard workflow on "shared" types:

Add another workflow -> pick standard workflow -> select "all unassigned"

This way you can have different groups in one project (for example Game 1, Game 2) and easily manage it.