Jira Board for Cross Platform Releases

Question

Hello!

I work for an IoT company and our features always include some type of firmware, mobile, and server release. Now historically we've had individual boards for each team but we are experimenting with one board and cross functional tickets.

The problem we are running into is how do we handle releases? If one story has subtasks that have iOS, Android, mobile and Firmware. How do we track those subtasks to individual platform's release ?? i.e. subtask 1 is related iOS 1.2, subtask 2 is related to Android 1.2, subtask 3 is related to server 4.5

We thought about using labels but we don't like the idea of a free form text field. We could use a custom field so that each task gets associated with a particular platform release, but wanted to hear on what everyone else was doing.

Mirvise Najafe · Answer

Sure.

We do work in sprints, and historically, we have had one epic in one project that links to individual platform/OS projects. The challenge we come across there is that the company remains siloed and we would like more cross-functional participation.

We are wondering if one cross-functional board would work.

Example:

lets say the feature is "as a user, i would like to name my device using the mobile app"

Historically, each platform team (mobile, firmware, backend) has had its own board and broken down that story further into subtasks.

What if we had one board, and all individual platform subtasks were listed under the story.

There are a few challenges with this:

1. how do you then track each subtask to that OS release (maybe using fixed versions).

The issue with fixed versions is that, when you move to this model, you end up having 5-6 squads. You then have to make sure that the same fixed versions are being shared across all the squads.

Christoph Schötz · Answer

Hey Mirvise - you might want to use fix versions with appropriate names?

Can you tell us a bit more about the setup you are thinking of? You want to work in one common project with stories with subtasks related to the different OS? Are you working in sprints? Have you thought about using epics in one project and linking stories in OS projects to it instead of using stories and subtasks? You could then have fix versions in the OS projects.

Cheers

Christoph