How can Issues from different JIRA projects be grouped in one swimlane associated to a Story?

[Andreas Möbs]

By default, GreenHopper groups sub-tasks under their respective Story as swimlanes in Work Mode.

How can issues from a different JIRA project be grouped (or associated) to a specific Story, so that they are displayed in the respective swimlane?

[Chris McFadden · Accepted solution]

I have some ideas for you. The first is to update your board's filter to include the different JIRA projects (i.e. systems or subsystems) that the team works on. I highly recommend following the "I" rule in "INVEST" which is that your story should be Independent. Break up your stories so that they do not cross system boundaries. For example, System A has a story for providing a service, and System B has a story for using that service. This allows the stories to be worked on, tested, and even released independently (at least System A). This follows the "Component Oriented" approach to Agile and Scrum - which is sometimes frowned on for what I believe are misguided reasons since this approach follows the Lean best practice of loosely coupled architecture.

Alternatively, you could consider consolidating into fewer JIRA projects and leveraging the "Component" field. But you should pick one of those two approaches and make the tool work for you, rather than against you.

[Andreas Möbs]

I agree, that the tool doesn't seem to be usable in the way the JIRA system in my organization is set up, which is "system oriented", i.e. there is a JIRA project for System A, System B, etc. Any new functionality introduced during development has to be managed in the respective JIRA project.

The Scrum artifiacts (Epic, Story, Task) for new development projects should be kept separate from the system related issues as they are rather "short lived" in comparison.

What I'm looking for is a way to associate the issues from System A and System B to a Story in a different JIRA project (the "planning project") and that's obviously not the way the tool is supposed to be used. Probably worthwhile to consider this as a feature request?

[Michael Ruflin]

In JIRA subtasks always belong to the same project as standard issues, you therefore won't be able to use Story/subtask swimlanes in your use case.

What you could do instead though is shifting your hierarchy: What you currently call tasks become issues (they already are if they live in different system projects!), and shifting stories to epics. The epic swimlanes feature (released today with GH 6.2.1) will then allow you to group the issues by epics in work mode.

[Andreas Möbs]

Thanks Michael! Although that might be a feasible workaroung, I do not really see, why issues have to be grouped by Epic instead of grouping by Story, which would make much more sense to me.

It looks like a conceptual glitch, as (GreenHopper) Technical Tasks and their mapping to the corresponding Story are represented by Sub Tasks, whereas Stories are mapped to their corresponding Epic by means of the "Epic Link" field. Wouldn't it make sense to introduce a field like "Story Link" for this kind of "linking"?

[Chris McFadden]

You can use the Issue Linking feature, if it is enabled. You may either use the existing link types, or you may create new link types, depending on your business rules. For example, you can create a link type of Parent/Child with links of "Parent of"/"Child of". Then you can use the "linkedIssues()" JQL method to get any linked issues for a issue. I recommend using the JQL Tricks plugin which has a lot of advanced issue linking query methods - since you will likely want to include only issues linked of a certain type. You may also find the "Parent" method helpful if you want to include the subtasks of the linked issue in the swim lane as well.

That said, I would reconsider what you are trying to accomplish from a business process perspective and simplify the implementation to better suit how the tool is inteneded to be used.

[Chris McFadden]

The only way to do this would be to write your own JQL queries for the swimlanes.

[Andreas Möbs]

That's what I feared..consequently, I would have to add a custom field to represent the association to the corresponding Story, right?