Are you managing releases in Jira? And how?

[Nikki Zavadska _Appfire_]

Hi 👋,

How are you managing your releases and are you doing it in Jira?

I'm asking because in the company I worked before we used to manage releases in Jira for each project and we were doing release trains.

Then we moved towards Continuous integration (but not delivery) and we're merging all issues to master and deploying twice per week. With this change, we stopped using Jira releases and we just run script which posts on Slack every time deployment is done the list of PRs from github which were released.

This solution kinda works because it's not that manual BUT we're missing the information in Jira itself and we can't really filter and see from there what issues have been released and when.

[Ana Bolanos]

As a Release Manger, the tickets that were merged and were part of a release were tagged for that release.

We used dates, as we had weekly releases. If you have all the tickets from github, I think you would be able to follow a similar approach. 

[Aimee Smith]

Hi!

Do you have GitHub integrated with Jira? Are you using smart commits? You could add to your CI process and have the build job use Jira's API to add the release version to the Jira issues when a new release is created.

That would keep Jira updated and not require manual work.

[Ana Bolanos]

Hello Aimee,

Yes, that is a good idea. However, not for how we work w/in our business unit.  We are considering having the status auto update when a commit is done. The devs do not change the status. JIRA could be used a lot more. I'm working on that. 

Enjoy the rest of you day!

[Alex Laycy]

Hi Nikki,

If your sending a JSON message to Slack via this script, as part of that script you could also send a Webhook message to the JIRA automation plugin. That plugin could then update any issues based on certain criteria.  

With the amount of times it sounds like your doing releases, the lite (free) version might be worth having a look into.

When it comes to managing releases here, we're effectively using the approach that Aimee has outlined. 

- Alex