How to plan overall schedule with SCRUM in JIRA

[Steven]

Hi!

Imagine I'm having a project to build a car.
My car has multiple features, some are mandatory (like 4 wheels), some are optional (like air-condition).
The overall project goal is of course to build a car.

My team is working in scrum and we want to be able to either:

• set/inform of a deadline when we can deliver a feature
• get a deadline by when we need to deliver a feature
• know when we can deliver or overall goal of a "complete" car (might become a hard deadline)

I wanted to find out how to achieve this kind of planning safety with JIRA SCRUM.
Currently I tried to put several versions for each feature, meaning I tag stories with that version (wheels, air-con). Also I put a kind of grand version (the car) to all stories.
Now I can get a the version report for the whole car and an estimation when it's finished. As well as a version report for each feature.

The problem is that it seems JIRA doesn't take already gathered information about the progress from other versions.
So while the overall version continues to be estimated properly (it seems).
If I have a version that has never been worked on, even though all stories have story points, that version does not get any estimate.

What I ultimately want to do is to juggle around features to achieve the set deadline.
I want to be able to say that it takes so and so long to build the car with 4 wheels and air-con. Then see that maybe doing the air-con now takes too much time, so I pull it out to either be able to match the deadline or be able to set a realistic one that I can justify with the investors.
But maybe taking out the air-con feature will bring down the estimate a lot, so I'll be able to add other features.
Possibly later an issue arises with one feature and the estimate explodes due to unforeseen issues. Now I want to remove that feature to no harm the already communicated deadline. But again, I might be able to now add other features back.
And so on...

How do I do this juggling around in JIRA?

[Christel Gray]

It sounds like we're using the same method in Jira. We have one version to track the completion of the entire project, then we are using other versions to track different milestones within the project. So each Jira issue has 2 versions assigned to it. Unfortunately, Jira is not estimating project completion correctly. Jira projects we'll complete the project mid-July, but we project we'll complete it end of December. It doesn't account of issues that we're still adding and we can't adjust for changes in the team (I know we're not supposed to adjust the team, but it happens in our company - it's just a fact of life).

I don't know how to solve your concern, but want to commiserate with you.