With the Cloud Premium plan of Jira, you get Advanced Roadmaps included. The tool helps you plan and track your work across multiple teams and projects. Based on the principles of the iron triangle of planning, it helps you answer the most common question related when it comes to running projects: "Are we still on track?".
Although different methodologies apply a different angle to the triangle (as shown in the below image), project planning always involves these 3 dimensions: scope, resources and time:
In Advanced Roadmaps, those dimensions are represented as follows:
While assigning issues to releases is very often a manual process in the hands of a product or project manager and his/her team, work can very often be assigned to a team automatically.
Unfortunately, setting a default value for the advanced roadmaps Team custom field is not supported out of the box. However, with a little effort and some advanced syntax, you can set the value of your choice. Doing so will quickly turn into a time saver and a big improvement to the data consistency of your plans!
Look up the ID of the Team custom field
When we will set up the automation rule later on, we will need to refer to the Team custom field by its ID. So it's important that you have that at hand.
Navigate to Settings ‣ Issues ‣ Custom fields. Locate the Team custom field and click through to view field information. The url of the page that shows up will mention the field's ID, as in this example:
yoursite.atlassian.net/secure/admin/ConfigureCustomField!default.jspa?customFieldId=10001
Write down the custom field ID (in this case: 10001) for later use.
Make any team you want to set a shared team
The Team custom field only allows you to set shared teams from advanced roadmaps. Because of that, make sure that any team you want to automate is indeed a shared team.
If you don't know how to set this up, have a look at this article.
Uncover the numeric identifier of your team
A final caveat is the way teams are referenced. Although they are displayed nicely by their name in Jira, in search or automation the associated team ID is used. It is fairly easy to find out what those ID's are;
Navigate to Filters ‣ Advanced issue search. Create a new search for any team you like:
Team[Team] = "Your Team"
If you run the search, you will see how the JQL editor automatically converts the team name to the corresponding ID. Take a note of this as well.
Document which issues can be assigned to your team(s)
It is definitely a good practice to set up a (scrum or kanban) board for your team. This is the planning and tracking hub where your team members can find all their work, in a single place. That work can come from one or multiple projects. But no matter how, your board has a board filter that fetches all the issues for your team. You may very well use that filter as the source for your team's work.
✅ Tip
I often use the project category to mark all projects that belong to the same team. Doing so makes it pretty straightforward and dynamic to locate all projects and related issues for a team.
If your team is working across multiple Jira projects, create a global automation rule. If your team is working in a single project, a project automation rule may do the job just as well.
As the idea is to automatically update the Team field when an issue is created, we can set up a pretty simple rule with 3 components:
As this last step is the key to the entire automation, I'll dig in a bit deeper into the logic and decompose the code:
{
"fields": {
"customfield_10001":"6"
}
}
Make sure you don't forget the { { } } in your code here, as they make sure everything is interpreted correctly by the automation engine.
Apart from that, all you need to do is fill out the custom field ID from the Team custom field and the numeric identifier of your team you retrieved earlier.
Just repeat the process for different teams.
While not difficult to set up, this used to be a poorly documented trick that - hopefully - adds a lot of value and more consistent data for your advanced roadmaps!
Walter Buggenhout
Atlassian Expert
Axians Belgium
Belgium
1,457 accepted answers
6 comments