JIRA Agile with Multiple Projects

[Jessica_Moszkowicz]

I'm looking for a best practice for using JIRA Agile across several projects. Here is an example scenario. Say you have several APIs in development. Each API has its own project. Three of these APIs are generally released together and follow the same version (e.g., API-1 will be on version 1.0 at the same time as API-2 and API-3). We want to have a sprint that takes these three APIs from version 1.0 to version 1.1. It's clear that we can create a Scrum board using a filter that grabs these three project and then use a filter on the fixVersion to figure out what should go into the sprint. Is this the best way to do this though? I've noticed that a lot of the gadgets and reports for JIRA Agile don't do well when there are multiple projects on a board. For example, the two dimensional filter statistics gadget mentioned in last week's JIRA Insiders mail looks pretty awful when you try to include multiple projects. You get a separate row/column for each version from each project, since the versions don't relate to each other across the projects. Would it be better to have the three API projects be demoted to components of one project? What if there comes a time that they won't all be on the same version? Can different components have different versions? Or would we have to promote the component back up to project status? Is demoting a project to a componenet (and back) something that's easily done?

[Dave]

Hi Jessica,

I think the problem here is that versions are project specific, so you might be best off going with a single project and multiple components, or issue types.  Components are part of a project like versions, so you can't have versions specific to components, though you could potentially create a custom field for this (note that would not be reflected on most gadgets).  There's no utility to change between a project or component, so this would not be a trivial task - you would probably have to move the issues to a single project using bulk editing.

Cheers,

-dave