Checkbox list of agile boards

[Philip Schlesinger]

Hi all,

How do I create a JIRA custom field with a checkbox list of all of the current JIRA Agile boards?

Many thanks in advance for your help,

/Phil

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

You'll need to write some code for that.  

I'm not sure you'd want to do it as a checkbox too -  JIRA Agile users often generate a large number of boards quite quickly, and it's not unknown to find a JIRA with hundreds of them, which doesn't really translate cleanly into a neat checkbox.

I think it might be easier for you to explain the reason behind asking for a field like this - what are you trying to achieve?

[Philip Schlesinger]

Hi @Nic Brough [Adaptavist],

Current Situation

if a JIRA ticket is created on Team A's project and some of the work requires Team B to complete the work, one of the following things happens:

• a duplicate ticket is created on Team B's project, or
• Team A's ticket is moved to the Team B project

In both cases, often the result is Team A never knows the status of the ticket unless they look it up on Team B's JIRA Agile board. This results in a lack of visibility on similar issues.

Proposed New Process: "Interdisciplinary"

• Once a ticket is created, it is never duplicated or moved to a different JIRA project
  • The ticket can be assigned to a member of a different team, but the ticket remains in the creation team's JIRA project
• The "owner" of the ticket remains the team which created the ticket in the first place (i.e. the team which first observed the need for the work)
• Each team which has a vested interest in an "interdisciplinary" ticket's completion can monitor the ticket and its subtasks via their own team's JIRA Agile board (most often, this would be via JIRA Agile swimlane)
• There should be a JIRA Agile Kanban board to watch all of these "interdisciplinary" tickets

Potential Solutions

Not preferred:

• Labels
  • It's easy to mistype – there's no pre-set list to pick from
• Component
  • Components are project specific – need this to be globally available to all projects
• Built-in custom fields: (Flag, Checkbox, Label, Multi-select list)
  • Not automatically generated; needs to be manually curated by admin user

Ideas:

• Custom field based upon auto-generated list of JIRA Agile boards:
  • Using the "Current Situation" above as an example:
    • Team B's JIRA Agile board admin adjusts the Team B board to include all tickets with "Interdisciplinary = Team B"
    • User on Team A edits a Team A JIRA project ticket and for the field "Interdisciplinary" selects "Team B" from the auto-generated list
    • Team B now looks at their JIRA Agile board and sees Team A's ticket
    • As Team B works on the ticket, Team A sees the progress on their own JIRA Agile board as the ticket was created part of a Team A JIRA project
• Adjust JIRA Agile boards to include any tickets which are watched by members of their team:
  • Using the "Current Situation" above as an example:
    • Team B's JIRA Agile board admin adjusts the Team B board to include all tickets with "Watcher in (members of (Team B))"
    • Someone on Team B watches Team A's project ticket
    • Team B now looks at their JIRA Agile board and sees Team A's ticket
    • As Team B works on the ticket, Team A sees the progress on their own JIRA Agile board as the ticket was created part of a Team A JIRA project
    • The one caveat with this configuration is that if the Team B user who watches the Team A project ticket is on multiple teams – i.e. multiple JIRA Agile boards – then the ticket will show up in all of those JIRA Agile boards – even those teams which couldn't care less about that Team A project ticket
• ???? Other options?

I think that covers it.  Thoughts?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I can't see how a custom field with a list of boards would be any better than a simple flag field on the issue saying "interdisciplinary". It's actually worse, because the list of boards is going to change and adding a new board is going to require you to go back over the field and get the humans to update it (not to mention the coding, and the ugliness of having hundreds of options on screen). Boards are very much designed to work on the data on issues, so a simple "interdiscplinary" flag will be easily filterable to generate your board. All the other proposals above also require action on the part of the users, and simply setting a flag is probably an easier interface than the others.

[Philip Schlesinger]

Hi @Nic Brough [Adaptavist] , The problem with a single, unified interdisciplinary flag would be that ALL boards would see tickets where the flag is checked. We want teams to explicitly subscribe themselves (or be subscribed by another team) to specific tickets where they have a vested interest -- and remain subscribed until that subscription is removed. The interdisciplinary feature should permit 0 to n team subscriptions. I just don't want to have to update the interdisciplinary field every time a new team board is created. I'd rather it auto-populate the field's selection choices by querying the database for a list of boards. But you do bring up a point -- would refreshing the list of board choices blow away existing subscriptions? Hmmmm....

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Hmm, that really does make a lot of sense, I hadn't really grasped that before. An idea on improving the idea of a simple flag - instead of a really plain checkbox, use a custom field of some sort. There's a few options here - a multi-select naming the "interested teams" would be a much better option than a simple "interdisciplinary" flag because you could write filters (and hence boards) like "interested team = x". The difficulty here is that you have no way to generate "a list of boards" - anyone can create boards and there's no real way to make that useful. If you stick to a "team is interested" flag on issues, then the board issue goes away.

[Philip Schlesinger]

Ok thanks