Using JIRA to manage incremental, internal releases

[Robert Dailey]

Internally we create tags in GIT for each release we make to QA. Each release to QA increments the 3rd component in our version number. So if we have this:

1.0.0

Our second release to QA will increment the 3rd component, so now we'll give them release:

1.0.1

The only time we update the 1st or 2nd components is when we do an official customer release. So the "production" release, disregarding any internal builds, is "1.0". When we're working on our next feature set, we will increment to "1.1" or "2.0".

Using JIRA, how can we manage releases efficiently using this strategy? I want to avoid having to hassle a project administrator to add new versions for each QA build (3rd component change), which can happen multiple times a week.

It would be ideal to just track version "1.0", and only add versions each time we do a customer release. When we are marking bugs as fixed for QA, we'd have to provide 2 bits of information. First, we'd need to say the bug is fixed in customer release "1.0", but we'd have to specify the 3rd component somehow to let them know which QA build it is addressed in.

Related to this is reporting. We'd like a 1-click solution to generating a list of bugs addressed in each QA build we release. How can this be done in JIRA using our release model?

Thanks for the help.

[Andrew Wolpers [BlackPearl PDM]]

Have you weighed the options of using the "Labels" field for the smaller releases? Seems like that could make some sense and provide some relief to your Project Admin. Of course, you would just need to make sure that everyone is using the same punctuation and such.

The Label field is searchable, so if you created a filter for this you could continue to refer to it from a filter.

[Robert Dailey]

Does the feeling that this doesn't work smoothly in JIRA indicate a problem with our release model? I'm not sure how else to keep track of which defects are resolved in each QA deliverable outside of using version numbers. If there is another way then I'd love to hear it.