Looking for release management ideas and best practices

[Jordan McCrary]

I'm sure this has been covered numerous times, but I couldn't find any topics that seemed directly related - and I think I'm looking for some "real world input" as opposed to just "official best practices". 

Summary: We are a very small distributed team. I was brought on to implement project management/DevOps because the company previously had nothing but email. I have some formal project management experience, but Jira is "new" and the past year or two has just been spent setting up the platform/workflows/statuses/etc 

I recently started using Kanban boards & releases - but I'm having some issues managing releases "properly"

1. When all issues are marked "Done" - everything is fine. 

2. When most issues are marked "Done" - but some "To Do" items will not make it into the release by the deadline, I can just mass-move them into a new release - and everything is fine.

3. When we have several "In Progress" issues - I'm not sure how to best handle them.
I can manually move them to the new release, but this is somewhat tedious when I need to do this for 15-20 bugs/issues

I can move them into the 'To Do' column & mass move them to the next release, then move them back to "In Progress" - but again, this is tedious. 

Is there a way to move them into the new release but keep their current progress, without the manual effort? 

Additionally, I want to move towards more of a scrum methodology - but I can't get this team to estimate their own tasks, at all - and our boss has never made them/won't make them now; which means I'm doing the estimations. Any advice for coaxing a team to do this? 

Any other advice in general from small distributed teams? 

Thanks in advance!

[Manon Soubies-Camy]

Hello Jordan,

Can't help you with the scrum part, but have you tried bulk change? You could update the Fix version or transition all of your issues at once.

Hope this helps,

- Manon

[Jordan McCrary]

Somehow it hadn't occurred to me to just filter by version/status. 
This will work perfectly. 
Thanks.

[Manon Soubies-Camy]

Glad it helped! :)