How to share releases between projects with Cross-project versions in Jira

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Launching a new product or feature often involves multiple teams working closely to get it done. Whether you’re an engineer or content writer, tester or marketer - we all aim to sync our releases. But what is the right way?

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When we prepare a release, we don’t just code and deploy to production. Or do we 🤔? Anyway…  The fact that several teams are involved in the process can make it hard to be on the same page.

Releases help teams organize the delivery of work and act as a historic reference for future needs. They are at the core of every project. Jira is good for managing your releases at the project level.

Of course, each team can manage their own tasks, can have different workflows, reports, etc. But when it comes to releases you still need to launch only one version that delivers tasks from several of these projects. How would this work in Jira?

Option is to create a version with the same name in each of the projects and then once version is done manually update each of these versions. It might work fine for 2 to 3 projects for a while. But can you imagine doing this every time and for more projects?

How to sync versions between multiple projects?

Our team runs 2 projects in Jira when delivering features for our apps. The Product team builds the feature and the Marketing team delivers tasks in order to launch the feature. Each of our teams has a separate project created.

The native functionality of Jira doesn’t include cross-project or portfolio releases. Fortunately, this can be done by using one of the external apps.

Let’s take Swanly - Release Roadmap Timeline app, for example. With the help of Swanly, both dev tasks from App Project and marketing tasks in Marketing Project are linked to a single release shared in both of these projects. Here is step by step how we have done it:

1. Create a release with multiple projects assigned,

2. Jira versions are created in each selected project. Any change done to any of these versions are automatically synchronized,

3. Go ahead and assign the issues to these versions as usual and carry on,

4. find everything you need in one place - have a look at your releases on a timeline or list view, check advanced release details with:

• Aggregated Story points and Time tracking

• List of the issues linked to the version and List of issues that affect the version

• Release History

If you're looking for version synchronization give it a try and start free 30 day trial.