How do you work with Portfolio stages in Jira itself?

[Kevin White]

We are evaluating Portfolio for Jira, and the Stages feature looks very useful. We want to be able to include estimation for development and QA for stories, and Stages seems to allow that.

When you have stages set to concurrent, they get scheduled into the same sprint. Presumably, this means that if you actually assign those stories into a sprint, you would work on those stages and when they are complete, your story would be complete.  Is there any way to actually keep track of having "done" a stage for a story? Or is it just conceptual for planning?

If you have stages scheduled into consecutive sprints, this seems to violate the way Jira Agile works. A story is meant to be put into a single sprint, and if you carry it over into another sprint, the work isn't counted for the first sprint and its velocity drops, and you use up some story points capacity for the second sprint.   How are you supposed to reconcile this? 

A shorter version of this question is, "What do stages mean in the context of Jira, versus Portfolio?"

The documentation doesn't really address this. 

[Rohan]

Hi Kevin White

Stages are a concept that exist only in Portfolio to assist with planning, but they are not currently reflected in Jira. One way to reflect progress on a stage is to update the stage estimates individually in Portfolio.

Alternatively, you could create separate subtasks/issues to reflect the stages of a task. That would allow you to complete them individually.

We hope that helps answer your question.

Thanks,

The Portfolio for Jira Server Team