Can I have a parent board that is a merge of all the individual boards?

Rajiv Peter

My team is split into four departments. I have a scrum board for each department with sprints in each as you will expect. It works for the managers of the departments. All sprints start and end on the same dates i.e., they are synced. I would like to create a parent or top board for the whole team that I manage which ideally keeps the individual sprints (whish are identical) and show all the issues from all the departments for that sprint in the same priority order. 

Is this possible?

Andy Heinzer

You can create a parent or master board like this that contains all the issues from the other boards/projects.  But this could be problematic if you do.

The steps to do so would be to first create a new saved filter that includes all the issues that exist in the other four boards.   Depending on the complexity of the other board filters, this might be a long JQL, or it might just look like this:

(project=A) OR  (project=B and issuetype=bug) OR (Project=C and label=teamalpha)  OR  (Project=D and component=hardware)  ORDER BY Rank desc

If the JQL for each board is complex, you would have to use a bunch of OR statements to get all the issues in correctly.   However if you're just using a simple filter of 'project = XYZ' for each board then you could use something more simple such as

project in (A,B,C,D) ORDER BY Rank desc

You need to save the new filter first, and then you can create a new board based on that specific filter.  Since the Rank field is a global field, the values you will see the same rank values here as in the other boards, you just have more issues in this one.   

This kind of setup has other potential problems though.  For example if you take an issue in project A and add it to a sprint that was created in project C, you can still see it in that parent board, but board A won't show that specific issue if the board filter there is only set to show issues in project A, AND this sprint A will suddendly appear in board C (but will only appear to have that one issue in it.)

This kind of scenario can confuse the other users that can only see/manage their own individual boards.   It's a common complaint that when sprints have issues from other unexpected projects that a different user with the manage sprint permission might close that sprint name prematurely because they are unaware of the other issues that do not appear on their board view.