Can we enforce the Align requirements/rules in JIRA?

[Sapna Pratap]

We are new to Jira Align. We also use Jira. There are various rule around number of sprints, sharing stories across boards etc for data to flow from Jira to Align successfully. We realize the mistake only based on the logs. Is there any way to enforces these rules as illegal operations in Jira? If we get a warning or an error in Jira we can take care of the issue before we break things in Align then back track and fix.

[Tina Behers]

@Sapna Pratap 

The short answer is yes you can. 

HOWEVER, as an organization, you will want to be very deliberate on when and how those changes are made. 

A common example of "bad" Jira behavior that affects integration: 

 multiple teams working from one Jira Project with multiple boards all sharing one sprint or concurrent sprints on a single board for multiple teams  - simple options to solve this in Jira.  Larger communications would be encouraged with the teams, as you break them to separate boards and sprints (at a minimum) 

Over the last  6 years, during my time with AgileCraft, Atlassian and Cprime I saw hundreds of variations of "misalignments' in Jira, really large extended logs in Jira Align and as a result, spent hundreds of hours resolving them with my customers. 

Every single issue was able to be resolved. 

To the point Nic was making, as an organization attempts to scale, it is imperative to balance the reporting needs of the organization with the needs of the team and please NOT forget to account for regulatory/governance requirements.  I.e. Dev's not accepting their own stories. :) 

Happy to discuss more with you privately. Feel free to reach out. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

There is not a simple answer to this.

You need to make a balance between authoritarianism and freedom.  You could dictate that everyone does things in the same way (this does not work).  You could let everyone do whatever they want that works for them (this works, but only for getting the odd thing done, not getting the overall stuff done)

Your use of Jira Align suggests you want to let teams work in their best way, allowing them to deliver the best value, while still being able to do large-scale multi-team planning and prediction.

You need to moderate.  Get people the visibility of your wider goals, and engaged in meeting them all.  Everyone needs to see that.   Then they can frame the bits they might do, and focus on what delivers the best value or gets to the goal most quickly.

Don't think "illegal operations", get your people to understand what the goals are and then think "do the right thing"