How to I structure a project with multiple live minor versions across multiple major releases?

[jonathan.bell]

I'm in the process of migrating from our legacy system into JIRA and we need to maintain our project structure to minimise disruption to the teams and to clients. My problem is this:

We have multiple release streams of which there are multiple live minor versions in the wild at any one time. An issue may arise which affects all the currently supported streams. I need to be able to highlight that issue as affecting those streams, have it visible in each stream's backlog and allocate it to a specific release version below each stream as those releases become realised.

eg. 

Project

|_ Streams

      |_ 1.0

           | 1.0.1

           | 1.0.2 (last release out the door for this stream)

      |_ 2.0

           | 2.0.1

           | 2.0.2 (back patches being merged for release. scope already set)

      |_ 3.0

           | 3.0.1

           | 3.0.2 (under active development)

Defect X is found and it affects the newest version of all 3 streams. 

We can expand our scope for 3.0.2 to include the fix.

We cannot expand our scope for 2.0.2 so it will go into 2.0.n (2.0. something but must show up in the 2.0 backlog)

We are not aiming to release another 1.0 stream release but if we must for a critical bug, we will also factor this fix in as it's low risk so this will be 1.0.n (1.0. something and must be in the 1.0 backlog)

How do I structure my tickets and kanbans to demonstrate this?

I don't want 3 tickets because there is only 1 bug and the single fix will get merged across all three streams so only 1 git commit.

I could use fixVersion for my final release versions of each stream but how do I track the concept of Stream 2.0 for example?

Effectively, we need a single backlog view of "all tickets not under development"

Another for "These tickets affect the 1.0 stream but aren't tied to a release"

Another for the 2.0 stream and another for the 3.0 stream.

Moving a ticket that shows up in 1 stream to a release scope and assigning it as "in progress" shouldn't make it disappear from the other backlogs.

For reference, we are a legacy waterfall style project and unlikely to reorganise into a scrum & sprint based release cycle. We are using JIRA v8.11

Thanks in advance.

[Kelly Arrey]

Hi Jonathan, in my experience, out-of-the-box Jira doesn't really handle this effectively.  Our use case is similar to yours, and we've addressed it very successfully using Structure for Jira. I recommend it very highly!