Is Jira Align different in supporting classic and next-gen projects?

[Ollie Guan]

Hello，

Currently I'm trying to manage sprint using next-gen project, I find a tip of next-gen project and Jira Align in the post below.

Cloud offers NexGen projects, but which should not be used with Jira Align.

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Align-questions/Is-it-possible-to-integrate-Jira-Align-with-Jira-Data-Center/qaq-p/1265746

I want to know if Jira Align is Jira Align different in supporting classic and next-gen projects?

[Peter Jessen]

Hi @Ollie Guan,

Jira Align can support Jira nexgen projects, but based on my experience, it is a pain in the backside that isn't worth the headache.

By the way, you are actually asking a question and not a starting a discussion. If possible, could you please move this to the question section so others can find it more easily and I'll move my answer as well. Thank you.

I would not recommend integrating Jira nexgen projects with Jira Align until Atlassian works out a number of issues with how they implemented nexgen projects. Fundamentally, the nexgen project is designed for project-level flexibility at the cost of not being able to use some of Jira's global functionality/objects.

Here's a post on the subject - Everything you want to know about next-gen projects in Jira Cloud. The key paragraphs are these -

Next-gen projects are:
...
Contained to themselves. There currently is no way to associate with other project settings, schemes, global configuration objects

and this one

Classic projects also leverage objects that exist only at a global level, across your entire Jira site. That makes it easy for Jira admins to push configuration changes across a bunch of projects. But conversely, end users are unable to manage configuration for their own projects. The burden of configuration falls entirely on Jira admins, making it a complex and time-consuming process to customize a project every time a new project or a new team comes to your Jira site.

Jira nexgen projects are designed to optimize locally (more team flexibility) at the cost of sub-optimizing (in a big way) globally. This is the exact opposite behavior wanted for any organization moving to agile at scale and Jira Align.

Jira Align is an enterprise platform designed to support strategic decision making through consistent roll-up of data across all teams (aka Jira boards/projects).

As such, the classic projects can be made more uniformly consistent to support Jira Align and strategic roll-up of data across the organization. The three most obvious and glaring issues with integrating nexgen projects into Jira Align involve issue types, workflows, and custom fields, although there are others.

1. Issue Types must be universal which means a single issue type ID per issue type.
   
   • Jira nexgen projects currently create a new issue type for each nexgen project.
   • Example: If you have 20 nexgen projects with standard issue types: epics, stories, etc. then you have 20 unique epic issue types, 20 unique story issue types, etc.
     • Jira Align is expecting a single issue ID for epics, a single issue ID for stories, etc.
2. Workflows must be universal (with maximum of a few variants)
   
   • Workflow state IDs must be identical for consistent, error-free integration with Jira Align
   • The more unique workflows there are (and each nexgen workflow is be definition unique) and the more distinct state IDs there are for the same identical workflow state name (again each nexgen workflow state has a unique ID, even if it shares the same name as others) the more manually mapping of workflow states is required in Jira Align.
3. Custom fields must be universal
   • While there are ways to (kinda, sorta) make the the above two problems work in trying to integrate nexgen projects with Jira Align, there is no current way to solve for custom fields having unique IDs per nexgen project.
   • @Tim Keyesaddresses that issue in his answer to the question behaviour of projects.

Regards,
Peter

[Rae Gibbs]

Hey Ollie - I just encountered a situation with a customer where they were trying to integrate a Next Gen project via the Jira connector with Jira Align.  This did not work.  I was advised by our support team that Next Gen projects are not supported via the Jira Connector at this time.  I'm not sure if your question is in regards to the Jira/Jira Align Connector but thought I would share my personal experience.

[Tim Keyes]

G'day Ollie and the Jira Align community,

The differences between a classic Jira Project and next generation Jira Project were highlighted extremely well in Peter's list.  I would like to add to Peter's 3rd bullet on custom fields that classic Projects use the Epic Link field to link Stories to Epics while next generation Projects utilize Parent Link to link Stories and Epics.  The Jira Align team is currently working on additional API calls to support the Parent Link and additional information will be released through our release notes as it is available.

We are also reviewing the functionality to support diverse issue types and workflows.  Any updates will be released via our release notes which can be found here:

https://agilecrafthelp.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/sections/115000566873-10X-Release-Notes

Cheers!

Tim

[Richard Wilson _Jarow Digital_]

@Tim Keyes  did you have any updates on this.  Seems rather inconsistent of Atlassian not to support next-gen projects given the marketing support Atlassian is putting behind these. 

[Peter Jessen]

Hi @Ollie Guan,

Would it be possible for you to repost your question as a question? As a community leader, you know the importance of accepted solutions. :-)

Thanks,
Peter

[Tim Keyes]

Hi Peter and Ollie,

I have moved this to a question, but please feel free to discuss the topic on this thread as needed.

Cheers!

[Ollie Guan]

@Peter Jessen@Tim Keyes@Rae Gibbs 

Thanks everyone for your help, I see that the type of this post has been changed to question, but I don't see the option to accept the answer?

[Ollie Guan]

Thanks!