Managing releases after sprint

[Kevin Preston]

I have set up 2 weeks sprints for my team and have a long backlog we will work through over the next 12 months and beyond. The issue I am struggling with is how we manage the release of stories into production.

Some stories will be completed, passed testing and UAT and into production before the sprint has been completed. Some Stories will not be released to production until weeks after the sprint has finished for a number of reasons.

Initially, we thought to add a column to the workflow after UAT for Pending Release where the stories would stay until released then move them to Done once relased, however,  this creates two problems. We won't be able to claim the points until the story has been released to production and as there are a large number of stories contribute to the future release of a complex feature, we will end up with a large number of stories that look they have not been completed and this is not how sprints are supposed to work.

So, how do you manage the release of stories in Jira while maintaining the integrity or purpose of a sprint, i.e Stories are completed when work is done even if they are not to be released yet.

Thanks in advance,

Kevin.

[Vinu]

Hi Kevin

I can only come to think of this solution.

If your release is something not in alignment with how your sprint works, its better to leave tracking your release from your sprint.

Once the development is complete, you can mark the story complete, claiming your story points. When the release is due you can create another issue with a different issue type (you can create this issue while your story gets complete to), link it to the story and track the progress of the release from kanban view rather than a sprint view.

This way your sprint is not affected and your releases get tracked through a separate kanban board.

There are several add-ons availble that can create a issue automatically when a story is closed and link it.