Multiple projects and one board OR one project, one board, use of epics to distinguish.

Debbie.dananberg

Which option is better and what are the advantages and disadvantages?  Having one Jira  board with multiple projects OR having one Jira board with one project and using Epics to distinguish between projects? 

Additional details: At this point we have one project team that will work on multiple "projects" or "epics" depending on which way we decide - so one board makes sense. Also, we are going to be using the Scrum framework.

Appreciate any feedback.  Thank you!

Ryan Fish

@Debbie.dananberg

A very subjective question  

1. How does the team want to handle incoming work?
2. What is the a business or technical reason for one option or the other?
3. What is the advantage of adding the layer of "project"? How will that extra layer be used in the future? How will it be used now (immediate future)?

It would seem by the provided information, your first option seems the most straight forward with one team/ one board, multiple projects (epics). The hierarchy could be something like board/ epics/ stories.

I currently use something similar to option 2, but with multiple boards where each team owns a board and their is a program level board holding all epics and features. Stories dwell on the team boards. The issuetype hierarchy is epic/ feature/ story/ sub-task. 

The result is I can have multiple teams working on an epic, each team views their issues on their own board. Teams can drill up to see a feature and its related work (on all team boards). I can drill down from the program level to see individual team stories and progress.

Hope this helps

Ryan