How to gain version control for board and roadmap?

[ashleyb]

We are trying to get version control to assess and see what changes are made to our board and roadmap however there doesn't seem to be any solution for this. Any ideas? 

[Walter Buggenhout · Accepted solution]

Hi @ashleyb,

I am not quite sure if you are looking into version control of either configuration or the data on your boards and roadmap. 

In terms of configuration there is indeed no versioning or change control in place. There is a decent amount of audit logging in place in Jira, but that does not cover changes to boards or roadmaps. For the (basic) roadmap, there isn't much to be configured on top of that.

If you are using scrum (boards), the associated sprint report does provide quite some insights as to what you committed to for a sprint and what has happened during execution. Apart from the burndown chart, it also lists:

• issues completed in the sprint
• issues that were not planned but not completed
• scope changes during the sprint (issues added, removed or estimate updates)

Apart from that, both boards and roadmaps are functional views on issues. The real changes are happening there and logged in the issue history of every individual issue. Updates to:

• estimates
• start and due dates
• status

are all events that impact what is shown on your board and roadmap. Every change is recorded in Jira and can be retrieved from the history tab of the issue. Admitted, reporting on that information is not straightforward.

Much depends on what you want to achieve. When I hear versioning of the roadmap, I automatically hear we want to compare where we are to the initial plan. And when we change the plan, we want to compare again what changes to the updated plan. Which boils down to monitoring how well you planned initially. Considering that almost every plan is already outdated the minute work actually starts, one might wonder if it is that important to track how many times the plan needs to be adjusted along the way ...

Still, if you are on a premium plan and using advanced roadmaps, the tool has the option of scenario planning. That may allow you to create an initial version of the plan and adjusted versions / scenarios as you move along.

You could also have a look at Gantt planning apps in the Marketplace, as some of them may offer the option to include a baseline to your plan.

Hope I managed to give you some useful pointers there!  

[ashleyb]

@Walter Buggenhout thank you so much for that in depth answer. I think the biggest reasoning was to see the changes that may be made to the roadmap by our major stakeholders, but this is all such good info in general.