Releases and versions

Steven Battisti

Hey folks, 

Brand new, my company is just starting to look into using Confluence and Jira together, although this post is mainly about Jira.

I work as a product manager, and we're already having some differences of opinions about how to use the Release and Version capabilities.

From a product perspective, a Release might be, let's call it Product A 4.0. However, in order to release Product A 4.0, we actually need to release three separate software applications, which might be Component A 1.2, Component B 1.6, and Component C 1.556.

Rather obviously, from a product standpoint we need to be able to keep track of everything that needs to be done to get Product A 4.0 out the door. When we look at our board, it needs to represent every issue that is being worked on in this sprint, regardless of which application it's for. But similarly, more from a technical side we ultimately need to be clear on what work went into Component A 1.2.

Any thoughts or best practices on how to handle this as cleanly as possible?

Thanks so much!

Kian Stack Mumo Systems

On the surface this sounds like a great use for components. Components are essentially project specific lists that can be used as sub categories for the project. JIRA has some great options with components for automatic assigning of tickets and filtering. You can set lead developers and report on the components fairly well. In your case, one option would be to create the components for each Separate application, and as tickets are created for the different apps, assign them to the correct component.