How to organize Jira when a story/defect has to be worked by multiple teams over multiple sprints.

[chassidy rentz]

The area I work in is made up of 5 teams. A Story or Defect may have to go through all 5 teams before it is ready for deployment, maybe just 2, maybe 3, maybe 4... depends on what it is. Each team gets their own time period/sprint (4 weeks) to complete their portion. Currently, 1 ticket will travel to each team it needs to go to and then be closed out when deployed. Right now, we only use Jira for creating and tracking tickets. We don't have Sprints set up, can't get any reports or metrics, don't have any meaningful dashboards, etc. I would like to change that, but I need advice on how to organize our tickets. I thought about creating a sub-task for each team under a story or defect, but you can't load sub-tasks into a sprint. I also thought about having a parent story/defect ticket and linking child story/defect tickets to it... 1 for each team that has to work on the story/defect. Each child ticket can move to DONE when development for that team is complete, and the parent ticket can move to DONE after all children are complete. If I do it this way I can load the child tickets into the appropriate sprints and get metrics. I am open to suggestions, please?

[Kevin Bui · Accepted solution]

 I also thought about having a parent story/defect ticket and linking child story/defect tickets to it... 1 for each team that has to work on the story/defect. Each child ticket can move to DONE when development for that team is complete, and the parent ticket can move to DONE after all children are complete. If I do it this way I can load the child tickets into the appropriate sprints and get metrics. I am open to suggestions, please?

Hi @chassidy rentz - I think this makes a lot of sense, and is where I would begin. You can create an epic as your parent story, and under that epic have Stories (or Tasks), which could each be assigned to the individuals who need to contribute to the epic. The stories themselves can then have sub-tasks, if you want to really break down the work into granular steps.

If you want to learn more, Atlassian has a handy guide on working with epics in Jira, which you can check out here.

[chassidy rentz]

But we use Epics to identify larger bodies of work/projects. I don't think I would be able to use them here.

[chassidy rentz]

And thank you so much for the reply!

[chassidy rentz]

I was thinking I could identify the parent story with a label and link the children with custom link issues such as "parent to" and "parented by"

[Kevin Bui]

@chassidy rentz - If that's the case, then you could use issue links, to link all stories related to the one piece of work together. This is a good way to track tasks that are dependent on one another, especially if you're using the Roadmap in next-gen.