Versions vs releases

[Philip Winberg]

In our team we work with Kanban. We release once a week. We want to use versions as a "monthly view" of work, with Easy Agile Story maps, in order to be able to prioritize and structure stories in. 

When releasing we want stories to be included in the release. And versions preferably just to be a label for a number of releases. As it is now the stories are related to versions.

Any thoughts on how we can have our releases weekly and use Versions as an overview in Easy Agile Story maps?

Best regards
/P 

[Nick Muldoon]

Hi Philip,

Perhaps best for a quick chat on the phone.

A few questions:

• is it a continuous deployment environment, or is there one release each week?
• is it sufficient to see an issue resolved within the 'Month' Version? or, put another way, what is the driver for the release label?
• how far in advance are releases and versions planned? how much change is there from the plan to the actual release?
• does the team pull in new work as capacity allows during a given week?

Thanks Philip, have a great day,
Nick Muldoon
Product Manager, Easy Agile

[Philip Winberg]

Hi Nick

Thanks for your answer. See my replies below.

1. It´s one release each week.

2. I would say that the weekly level is great for our development team and for me to keep track on a detailed level. Having issues in one months release would result in very many issues in one release. We are quite a big team. The Versions is a way for us to plan and to communicate to stakeholders on a higher level.

3. Currently 3 months ahead on a high level. But preferably 3-6 months. There can be changes, but sometime there isn´t =)

4. Yes.

Best regards

/Philip

[Nick Muldoon]

Hi Philip,

Best option in this scenario is to use a Scrum board and create a weekly sprint. No need to go through all the ceremonies, and the sprint will let you group the weekly release train and report on it later.

You'll then have the option on the story map to look at the monthly version plus the weekly release sprints.

No need to change the practice you've got today, just leveraging Jira in a slightly different way to achieve the same outcome.

Hope that helps

Thanks Philip, have a great day.

Regards,
Nick

[Helen Ioffe]

i would use Kanban board with weekly releases (Fix version) set as swimlanes on your kanban board