Hi folks,
A question for all you JIRA gurus. As we're moving further and further into modular projects, each having their own release life-cycle, we're trying to come up with the best/easiest way of dealing with them. I don't consider this a unique problem that we have. I'd say pretty much each software company will end up with issue like this and still I see no obvious solution.
Basically we have a layer of back-end services (modules) that are serving different products (front-ends). Example front-ends are iOS & Android native app, web app etc.. Sometimes those front-ends need to be in sync but most of the time they can have different release cycles.
Our current approach is to use multiple projects for each module:
PROJA-MODULEA-124
Released
1.6.0
Unreleased
1.6.1
PROJA-MODULEB-123
This has the advantage that each module is its own project, with its own project lead, settings, and release life-cycle which better reflects the module.
The disadvantage is that this breaks the use of sub-tasks. Currently to reflect a single task that propagates into more than one module(projects) and actually complete a "Story" we end up crating Epics as JIRA natively does not support sub-tasks in multiple projects. Ultimately we end up with hundred of Epics for even smaller tasks.
An alternative would be to use a single JIRA project, and having multiple open versions for each module, such as:
Released
Module A 1.6.0
Module B 1.3.0
Distribution Release 3.0.0-GA
Unreleased
Module A 1.6.1
Module B 1.3.1
Distribution Release 3.0.1-GA
This has the advantage that a single issue can be configured with a FIX-FOR for multiple versions to indicate the fix affects multiple sub-modules (components). Here I can see some overhead on tracking if correct versions are applied and setting like 5-6 versions (5-6 modules) per Story.
I was wondering if there is a general consensus from you guys over which way is better, or worse, or preferred?
Some of the side-issues that we're looking at is also reporting on the progress of a project, or iteration - for example, iteration N contains work on Module A 1.6.1, Module B 1.3.1, and Module C 2.0.4. Being able to have a nice roadmap that covers a set of versions would be great (and would work with either the single, or multi-project setups)
Look forward to hearing from you 
Regards,
JD
