How to bring individual squad sprints in to a master sprint

Question

I have 5 squads, each with their own scrum project, backlogs and sprint. Moving forward, due to dependencies, I would like to run one master sprint that all squads add items to and deliver through.

How would I best achieve this? ideally the squads can just see their incisions if they would like to but also see all inclusions from all squads if they choose to.

Thank you

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Hi Jake,

This is not really something you can do in general, not just in Jira.  A sprint is a timebox for a single team, it does not have any layers, there's no such thing as a "master sprint" that contains sub-sprints.

The closest you can get is to adopt scaling processes (not necessarily trying to do SAFe or anything else here, I'm cherry-picking a couple of practices that might help you).  In the case of Scrum, you would align your sprints precisely across all teams - all teams start their fortnightly sprint after afternoon tea every other Tuesday, and then have most of the Tuesday after next to do the retro and sprint planning.  You only need to align dates here, just get everyone starting and ending sprints on the same day.

If all the sprints are aligned, you logically get a "master sprint", as you can say "my five teams all started on Tuesday the 40th and finished their sprints on the 54th" - five sprints, one timebox.  But Jira (and other Scrum software I've worked with) just don't have a way to represent that.

In Jira, I would use two things -

* a naming convention so that it is easy to see that all five teams are sprinting alongside each other (there's better conventions, but just using the start date of the sprint along with the project key is a simple way to start)
* a Kanban board that shows all the project team's sprints to view everything across the board.  You don't need (and probably don't want) a Scrum board for this, because it would add extra complexity.  The filter for that board is as simple as "Project in (1, 2, 3,4,5) and sprint in opensprints()"

Danut M _StonikByte_ · Answer

Hi @Jake S,

What is the reason for doing this? What do you want to achieve by doing this?

You can do this by creating an agile board based on a filter that returns issues from all the projects your teams are working on.

Danut