How to manage a high level roadmap providing some reporting capabilities to a management team

[Raphael Allegre]

Hi,

I need some help regarding the use of JIRA OnDemand.
We are currently using the tool to manage our 2-weeks agile Sprints.
Our Backlog is composed of User Stories, Bugs and Technical tasks.
This approach allows us to deal with the implementation of the features for the current release.
The problem is that our management team wants to manage the next releases roadmap.
They need some reporting and progress visibility on more high level items such as features/themes/scenarios.
How to provide that?

Create a new project with different issue type? What structure to use: issue and sub-issue? Epics with an Agile board? what they need is a list of high level items and for each of them a progress status (To be done, in progress, done). The "Roadmap" project has to be linked to our short term project in order to avoid duplicating the information I guess.

In conclusion, based on my explanations here, I would highly appreciate some help from you, something like good practices on to structure/configure JIRa in order to manage both high level and low level project development.

Thanks in advance for your help.
Cheers,
Raphael

[Alex · Accepted solution]

Hi Raphael,

You should be able to report on higher level project feature development using your current set-up and adding the EPIC issue type to your project. This is a simple modification to your current practice. Just add an EPIC and you can group issues like User Stories, Bugs, and Technical Tasks together. In your sprint planning sessions, you will be able to groom the backlog, see the issues as you currently do, and associate them to the EPIC. You should also be able to report on progress of an EPIC.

There are a number of ways you can set up JIRA to give you roadmapping information but this might be the easiest given your current set up.

See here for more information on how EPICs will allow you to categorize your backlog http://www.atlassian.com/software/greenhopper/whats-new/greenhopper-61

I hope this helps!

Thanks,
Alex