My team and I are using JIRA for over more than 3 years now. Our team consists of 6 developers and we are developing several online games. The current JIRA structure is as follows, we have 2 projects / boards:
- Development (SCRUM)
- Which is used for our sprint planning and our normal development cycle.
- All different games have tickets on this board and games are separated by epics.
- This give us the disadvantage that epics cannot be used to separate work in a single game.
- For every sprint we have a fixed number of hours available (depending in holidays etc), which are used to plan the work.
- Operations (kanban)
- Which is used to fix (unexpected) bugs directly on our master branch and to investigate user reported errors.
- For every sprint we have a guesstimate of the hours needed for our operational work. This number of hours is substracted of the sprint hours (see above).
- The entire team is responsible for both boards
However somewhere over the course of those 3 years everything around us has changed, but we've never changed the way we work in JIRA. And I'm not sure what's the perfect way to implement JIRA (and porfolio for planning) in our situation.
My best bet would be this scenario:
- We create projects for every "online game" (and some extra projects for general parts of our platform).
- This gives us the opportunity to use epics for what they were designed for (I suppose).
- Both board (development and operations) are using all those projects.
- Every ticket has a custom field, which can be used to determine if a tickets is "operations" or not. This field can then be used in the boards filters.
- We use portfolio for our long term planning.
- We use "cross-project releases" to keep the version of all the separate projects in sync.
The above scenario rises some questions:
- Would the scenario as described work? And is this best practice?
- What's the best way to deal with unexpected work (operations) in a team that does operational and sprint work together? And how should I handle the impact on the current sprint?
- As far a I know JIRA Portfolio allows for epics to be given an estimate which can be used in the planning, and the team then can create tickets / stories for this epic with a better estimate, which at some point are going to overrule the estimate of the epic itself?
Thanks in advance for helping us to use JIRA in the best possible way 