How to determine JIRA's in a Release

[Mike Bradley]

Hi,  I've been thrown into the JIRA world, and I have no experience with it, but everyone in the division I'm in is using it.  Just yesterday, I put out an Xcel spreadsheet with a list of product items, and the first thing that happened was my manager put it into Confluence... sigh...

OK, back to my question, there seems to be a concept of "Board" and "Structure", and probably other stuff.  What I really want is a list of epics and/or stories that are targeted for a particular release.  I created a "Board" which oddly just references another "board" so I'm not sure the point...  I think structure may be the answer, not sure.  

Ideally, I would like a list of epics/stories, and the targeted release version and then be able to sort on it, so I can see which ones go to which release.  This seems so simple to me, it is likely a dumb question, thanks for putting up with me :-)(

[Michael Andolfatto]

Hi @Mike Bradley , welcome to the community!

Just some background context that might be useful:

Jira has its own query language known as JQL which always returns a set of issues depending on how you structure the query. You can save and reuse these queries (which become known as Saved Filters) and they become the backbone of a lot of different Jira features such as Boards and Reports.

For your question, there are two fast approaches you can take:

1. Depending on the structure of your organization/your role this may be variable, but you should have a Jira project that you and your team work out of (or multiple) and the project should have one (or more) boards. The "board" in this case, is more than the physical columns (e.g. To-Do, In Progress, Done) but also encompasses issues in your backlog. If you're just looking to see a list of issues that fall under a specific Version or Epic, navigate to your project, select the board you care about, and click on Backlog in the left menu. Just click on Details under the release name to see all issues that belong to it.
   
2. By default, Jira users are able to create their own Dashboards which are hubs for reporting/monitoring used by individuals, teams, regions, departments, etc. If you prefer, you can always write some JQL to return issues you can about, save the filter, and structure reports in your dashboard to display information based on the issues.

I think the first approach is probably more in-line with what you're looking for, but it may be worth exploring the bolded words above (Atlassian has great documentation) just to see what you're able to do.