Using JIRA versioning as related to CI/CD within the construct of SAFe

[Allen Filson]

Wondering if anyone in the community has experience with versioning in JIRA (fix/target/'custom') within a PI,  running iterations and versioning a subset of the feature sets completed/accepted within the PI for deployment within the CI/CD pipeline.  From that pipeline, another subset of features might be presented for customer use (released).

Presently we use fix versions for each iteration in the PI and then set target version for the customer facing releases.

Not sure what others are doing but would be curious to read,..

Thanks in advance! 

[Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist]]

I have customers using fixVersions for PIs. They use sprints (from the scrum boards) for iterations.

[Allen Filson]

Hmmm interesting,.. so you only set the fix version for a release to customer feature??  

[Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist]]

Everything in the PI, including stories, tasks, defects carry the corresponding fixVersion. Hope that is what you were asking.

[Allen Filson]

ya,.. that's what we are doing,.. but when we 'choose' a feature to become customer facing (many different fix versions),.. currently we create a new fix version and affix the story, epic, sub-task with that new fix version. so what you get is story with multiple fix versions.  I would like to use 'target version',.. but that is not referenced in any of the 'releasing' features in JIRA.  Trying to 'scale-up' JIRA to address the concept of 'on-demand' releases from only fix versions seems to be 'hacky',.. was fishing around this community to see if someone had figured out a better way.

[Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist]]

Have you tried leveraging the "Version Picker" custom field?

[Allen Filson]

Does the 'Version Picker' custom field have visibility to the release hub in JIRA?

[Nimalka Lucas]

Hi Allen 

We are also currently currently trying to configure the versioning for CI/CD for fix versions. Are you using any automated workflow post functions to populate the target versions and is that just a custom field?

Regards,
Nimalka

[Allen Filson]

Nothing automated yet (but that would be pretty cool to try and implement)  Just setting by hand,.. kind-of-a-pain,.. :(

[Edmond McLaughlin]

"Trying to 'scale-up' JIRA to address the concept of 'on-demand' releases from only fix versions seems to be 'hacky',.. was fishing around this community to see if someone had figured out a better way."

+1 @Allen Filson  @Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist]  

We are trying to solve a similar problem and I'm curious to know what the outcome was of your experiments. 

We are using Jira, Portfolio and Zephyr (Enterprise) and what I am finding is that they all seemed to be geared toward planned releases, not the `on-demand` releases one wants with CI/CD.

What we are exploring is defining `working versions` for features and fixes that are in development, with the final release version applied to the stories through automation when the features/fixes are released. Jira has the ability to merge the multiple `working versions` into a `release version` and it seems like that could be useful, but it also requires a lot of manual updating of `working versions`. 

And, as noted above, this all hinges on the use of the single fixVersion field. And it is kind of hacky. 

If anyone has a working model they could share of their successful implementation of versioning as part of an `on-demand` CI/CD release pipeline in Jira, I'd love to learn about it.