Create Release Dependencies?

[christopher_griggs]

What is the best way to manage dependencies between releases (e.g. fixVersions). In JIRA FixVersion A 2.1 has a dependency on another application B 2.0. Meaning, A 2.1 cannot be deployed to production until A 2.1 has been deployed. Thuse A 2.1 is dependent on A 2.1 being released. How is this tracked in JIRA?

[João Nunes]

Hi, Christopher. How are you today?

The scheduled dates are the crux of Portfolio's functionality - that is, the scheduling algorithm determines those dates based on a number of factors including available team members, a size of estimates, dependencies, skills, etc. You can refer to this documentation: Scheduling behavior. Therefore, these dates cannot be "manually" adjusted as they are calculated. This is Portfolios "optimal" schedule based off all the parameters that a user has configured in their Portfolio plan. To change the scheduled date you would, therefore, have to adjust these parameters (which is described in the documentation). The target dates are used for baselining and will allow a user to set targets that can then be compared to the scheduled result and see whether their targets will be met and adjust accordingly.

Based on your scenario, if the issue dependencies are correctly set, Portfolio will always schedule the issues that are marked as the blocker before their liked issue to ensure that those issues will be completed before the issues that are blocked by them starts. That issues dependencies can be either imported from the Jira when you sync it with Portfolio or you can set that directly on Portfolio.

You can set those dependencies on Portfolio side by following this documentation.

Let me know if that helped you.

Kind regards,
JOÃO NUNES
Jira Support Team

[christopher_griggs]

Thank you, but that sort of missed my question. How does someone create a dependency between FixVersion 3.1, and FixVersion 3.2, e.g. 3.1 must be deployed before 3.2? - This is over simplified for the reason of explanation, but I do have the FixVersion of one team needing to be deployed before the FixVersion of another team.

When I say dependency, I mean, task A must be done before task B, regardless of schedule or effort to complete it. 

[João Nunes]

Hi, Christopher.
Thanks for your update!

Apologize if I miss your initial question.
Currently, the dependence we can set on Portfolio is on 'issue' level, in other words, we can only manually create dependencies between issues not releases/fix version. Base on that, we would need to manually create a dependency on issues related to 3.2 version on issues from 3.1. For example:

1. You have 3 issues on release 3.2 (3.2D, 3.2E and 3.2F) and 3 issues on 3.1 (3.1A, 3.1B, and 3.1C). You will need to make the issues from 3.2 blocked by the issues from 3.1.
2. You can manually like one issue from 3.2 to another one on 3.1: 3.2D blocked by 3.1A, 3.2E blocked by 3.1B and so on. Or you can create a 'fake task' on version 3.1 to be the blocker of all issues from 3.2 so you will only mark that fake issue as done, after all the issues from that version are completed: 3.2D, 3.2E, 3.2F are blocked by 3.1Fake.

That being said,there is an open feature request which aims to automate that process and make possible to create that dependency between releases/fix versions. We strongly recommend you to access that feature request page, click on vote for that to increase its relevance and click on Start watching this issue to receive all the updates about that.

If you are not familiar with our Feature Request Policy, you can learn more about it here.

Let me know if that helped you.

Kind regards,
JOÃO NUNES
Jira Support Team

[Andrew Harwood]

Christopher, did you ever find the answer to your question?

I'm having a similar issue, and would be interested to know where you landed with this.

[Dina]

Hi Christopher :) Did you ever solve this issue?