How to manage more SCRUM teams for one backlog

Michal Král June 29, 2014

Hi, we have more (6) SCRUM teams, all of them work on same application (Old Spaghetti non-modular application) and so we have one product backlog for them. We start with 1 sprint for 1 team in JIRA Agile, so we always run 6 sprints in the same time. But then we can not constraint counts of issues in columns and calculation of velocity for each team is not very straightforward.

Is there any other way to solve our situation?

Thanks for all suggestions.

Michal

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BenP
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June 29, 2014

I would create 6 different agile boards (1 per team, since each team commits to their own sprint scope).
The data can be pulled from the same 'product' project: It's possible to define board data filter either on assignee (assignee in role / team members list + assignee is empty) or based on a specific field value (component, a custom-field (cfr. Christian), ... )

Also, I don't think you need to have 6 separate sprints as such.. at least not if all teams work on the same frequency (e.g. same sprint length, start & completion).
You can include common (sprint marker) issues on all boards & assigned to 1 specific sprint, in order to make the same Sprints appear on all boards / for all teams.
Note that such an approach does require that the sprint completion, planning & new sprint start are all happening in sync across teams.

Finally, since reports (velocity ) are based on agile board definition, the report data should be as expected.

Michal Král July 2, 2014

Thank you very much for a long and great answer! Using the board filter and board for each team seems like the right way to go. Then we can have one sprint for all teams as long as they are synchronized.

FlipThisHouse2 December 1, 2017

is it possible to still do it with a separate sprint per team? and filter the sprints somehow during the reporting? 

jeleulja May 23, 2018

Yes, it is possible to create sprints in each board separately. If you wish for each team to have their own sprint, that’s the way to go. You will also be able to see these sprints in the “main” board once any issue from the backlog was added into the sprint. These sprints will also appear in “main” board reporting. 

Deleted user October 26, 2018

I'm having a similar issue and want to confirm given the following scenario:

We have 1 jira project with two sprint boards (two scrum teams)

Can someone please confirm:

Each sprint board will show reporting (i.e. velocity, burndown) unique to each scrum team

The sprints will be the same across both scrum teams, so they will need to start and stop at the same time.  

Thank you!

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John doe October 6, 2020

@jeleulja 

I have similar issue. I have a project and I created one master board which has complete backlog for the project. I also created three boards(filtered with component) for 3 different dev teams. If i start sprint2 in board 2, sprint2 is also getting triggered automatically for the other boards. i wanted to have separate sprints for each team in their respective board that may or may not start and end at the same time. how can i do that?

when i have separate sprints for each board, how to start sprint in master board wrt other boards? how i can see sprint report as whole on master board?

Thanks in Advance

bede October 7, 2020

Each team manages their own sprint - that's the default behavior. 

You may want to take a look at the Parallel Sprints lab feature 

Also, I think you can create a kanban board to aggregate all scrum boards of the different teams to visualize overall WIP. e.g. set a data filter based on the "project = X and sprint in openSprints()" or so, but realize that doing can have annoying side-effects, i.e. the reports based on agile boards typically assume that all issues in the data-scope of a board remains in that scope over time , otherwise the reports/metrics will get messed up. 

Cheers,
Ben

3 votes
Christian Czaia _Decadis AG_
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June 29, 2014

Hey, I'd use a custom "team" field representing the SCRUM teams. That way you can easily use quick filters and even diefferent team boards after you have "assigned" issues to the different teams...

Cheers

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