How to map several issue types in Jira to the limited number of issue types in TFS with TFS4JIRA or UseTFS?

Ivar
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
May 21, 2014

TFS 2012 with SCRUM template have three different work items: PBI, Bug and task.

In Jira we have some more (including our own) - user story, epic, bug, task, technical sub-task, improvements, clarifications and a couple of more.

Now - all of these do not have to be synced to TFS - e.g. clarification.

I assume the sync for some issues is as follows:

User story > PBI

Bug > Bug

Technical sub-task > task

What do you usually do about the rest? 2013 can link Features with Epics I guess; but what about the other "developer-related" tasks that should be synced? How do I map them? Do I create similar work item types in TFS?

1 answer

1 accepted

1 vote
Answer accepted
Andrzej Pasterczyk
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
May 21, 2014

I can't tell if that works with TFS4JIRA but with UseTFS it's common to set it up as:

User story -> PBI

Bug -> Bug

Technical sub-task -> Task (with parent/child link)

Task -> Task (without parent/child link)

The remaining JIRA issue types are not that commonly used by our customers and if they are they're mapped again to same items (e.g. Improvements -> PBI) with some custom field set to distinguish between them.

Ivar
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
May 21, 2014

@Andrzej, when you say custom fields I assume you mean in TFS :) E.g. that an EPIC is still a PBI, but with a "Is Epic" custom field created in TFS to indicate this.

This also means that user story > sub task relation is covered by looking at links in TFS. I assume that UseTFS will create a sub-tasks as a sub-task and not as a linked task to a Jira issue if it is created in TFS, assuming you have the "parent PBI" in both Jira and TFS? E.g. that you create a user story in Jira, sync it to TFS as a PBI, create a sub-task for the PBI in TFS and see this as a sub-task of the user story in Jira when the sync is complete.

How do you handle several levels of sub-tasks in TFS when this is not a possibility in Jira?

Andrzej Pasterczyk
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
May 21, 2014

That's what I've meant - but you can configure it however you like. Meaning there can be IsEpic boolean, or JiraIssueType string, or whatever you need.

As for subtasks the configuration is not trivial but in general UseTFS should create Sub-task from TFS task if there is parent TFS item linked, and regular JIRA Task if there's no parent.

The last one is a good question - we probably don't handle that to be honest :) Nobody asked before and I'm not sure if our implementation allows such relation. Or rather if JIRA allows to create a sub-task of sub-task behind the scenes (cause that's most likely what UseTFS will try to do) - could be possible since it's made directly using JIRA API which is much more tolerant than GUI. But I wouldn't count on that - so probably you can only have one level of sub-tasks, everything that is below will most likely end up as regular Task.

Suggest an answer

Log in or Sign up to answer