Jira Align Admin > Jira Management > Jira Boards: No Project Found Error when Integrating Team Board

[Tim Keyes]

When Integrating a Jira Scrum Board to a Jira Align Agile Team I am seeing a No Project Found error under Jira Align Admin > Jira Management > Jira Boards.

What is causing this error, what does this error mean, and how do I resolve the error message?

I am listing this as commonly asked question through our support desk.

-Tim

[Tim Keyes · Accepted solution]

Hi everyone,

No Project Found errors will appear next to a board mapping on the Jira Align Admin > Jira Management > Jira Boards page for one or more of the following reasons:

1. The connector service account does not have permission to view the board in Jira Software or the board was deleted.
2. The board has a filter share without the parent project in Jira Software.
3. The board has a filter share with multiple projects in Jira Software.

This error will result in stories assigned to the Jira Backlog not properly receiving a team assignment when they are synced with Jira Align.

You can read more on this topic at the following link: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Align-articles/Syncing-the-Team-Field-Between-Jira-Software-and-Jira-Align/ba-p/1253507

To resolve this error message we would check the filter share of the integrated board in Jira. According to the best practices, there should be only one integrated project for a team board. You can check it in the board setting (Open the board -> three dots in the upper right corner -> Board Settings -> Shares section).  The error will resolve itself after setting the board's filter share to include its parent project after the completion of the next automated board sync via the connector.

-Tim

[Peter Jessen]

HI @Tim Keyes

We resolved all the No Project Found errors at one client thanks to this tip.

I had a huge "ah hah" light bulb moment when you explained this to me on a call. It finally made sense why an Atlassian/Jira Align best practice for integrating Jira with Jira Align is to have one team per Jira project, since it allows all of the Jira backlog issues on a team board to sync over to Jira Align and show in the proper team backlog.

Most of my prior client implementations involved a single Jira project per program/Agile Release Train. This configuration allows for all program work to map to one Jira project and makes syncing features created in Jira Align to Jira easy, because there is no confusion as to which Jira project to select in the Jira Align feature creation screen - it's a simple 1-to-1 mapping. The downside (in the cases where we couldn't/didn't implement Custom Team Field Mapping Team Sync as described in the article you reference above) is that all the stories in Jira not assigned to a sprint came over in the unassigned backlog.

Of course, there is always a trade-off. The trade-off in implementing a mapping of one team per project is that assigning features from Jira Align to Jira projects gets more complicated. Instead of a simple 1-to-1 mapping between Jira Align programs and Jira projects, you now have a one-to-many, because every Jira Align program is now mapped to n+1 Jira projects, where n is the number of teams in the program and the +1 is for the program-level Jira project dedicated to the program features (Jira epics). [NOTE: Part of the best practice for implementing SAFe with Jira Align and Jira, as I understand it, is to create program-level project in Jira that is home to all features (Jira epics) for the program. The team-level projects contain no Jira epics, only stories, defects, sub-tasks, and other story-level objects (ex: spikes).]

If an organization has good Jira discipline I would definitely recommend the one Jira project per program approach utilizing the Jira Align Custom Team Field Mapping Team Sync functionality.

If an organization is starting out in Jira (or doesn't have good Jira discipline, which I've found is most cases), then I definitely recommend the one team per project approach, as long as Jira admin rights are locked down so all project workflows, issue types, and create/update templates remain in sync on a standard that works with Jira Align. Otherwise, we start playing whack-a-mole tracking down errors and issues caused by teams changing fields on templates, changing workflows, and adding unmapped issue types.

Speaking of whack-a-mole, one last share on this subject. We had a situation with a client where there were multiple teams mapped to Jira Align who shared a common Jira project. We had an issue where a lot of issues appeared to be "randomly" assigned to the wrong team in Jira Align. The ultimate root cause of the issue was that two teams (call them Alpha and Bravo) had the proper board configuration with filter share including the Jira project while the other teams (call them Charlie and Delta) did not. All of the stories in any of the teams' Jira Backlogs (not assigned to a sprint) were being assigned in Jira Align to the first team mapped to Jira Align with a proper board configuration, which happened to be Alpha.

We finally resolved this situation by moving all four teams to their own projects, but an alternative approach, if the teams had good Jira discipline would have been to use the Jira Align Custom Team Field Mapping Team Sync functionality. We didn't go this route because then we would have had programs that were a hybrid configuration - neither:

1. one Jira project to one Jira Align program or
2. one Jira project to one agile team.

Instead, we would have a combination of some teams sharing Jira projects and some teams having their own Jira projects. This would have been a longer term training, administration (Jira and Jira Align), and maintenance headache for the client.

Regards,

Peter

[Jennelle Stearns]

When setting up the Filter Share as @Tim Keyes noted above, make sure you give it "View" rather than "Edit" access.  We have noticed that when you give it "Edit" access, you will receive the No Project Found error but if you change it to "View" access the error will typically clear.

[Vandana Kurapati]

This article helped me to solve the issue.

[Brandon Harris]

Point of reference. Error in current Jira Align will display as:

No Jira project was found. Verify that the connector service account has permission to view the board and that the board has a filter share with the project.