Need advice on multiple boards / workflows and reports

[Marisa Harwood]

Hi,

I really need some advice on a Jira setup I'm trying to achieve. I've used Jira before as a user, but I've never had to set it up for a company and now, that's what I've been tasked with. I've got to grips with all the basic stuff, but I'm struggling with workflows and workflow schemes.

Here's what I need to do...

• Set up a scrum board for a development team (I've done this)
• Assign a workflow to that board (I've done this)
• Set up a Kanban board for BA's (I've done this)
• The BA Kanban board needs to follow a different workflow to scrum workflow
• Need another board and workflow for test and release - need advice on this as I think it should be part of the dev workflow?

Questions.

• Can you move issues automatically between boards. For example, when a BA has moved an issue in 'Done' on their Kanban board, can a set up some kind of post function to- move that issue to open on the development scrum board? Or, will this need to be a manual process?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated as I feel like I'm going round in circles to meet these requirements.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

You can't "assign a workflow to a board".

Workflows are determined by the issue type.  An issue will follow a single workflow through the process, the board and person looking at it can't change the process it is using.

For your two boards, you would have to use different issue types (or projects) to do it.  To move on to your question, boards are not containers for issues (projects are), they are a view of a selection of issues.  Issues do not "move between boards".

There are a couple of approaches here. 

First, yes, have separate workflows and hence issues for your board.  Assuming you have a single project, then you could have 

BA Board:  Project = XYZ and issuetype = BA-task

Developer Board: Project = XYZ and issuetype = Developer-story

Test board:  Project = XYZ and issuetype = Test

However, that is clumsy, because you'll need three issues for each and every story going through their processes, or you'll have to manually move the issues from one type to another every time it needs to change, which is slow, clunky and prone to error.

The better option is probably to define a single workflow for a story, and not mess around with different workflows.  If you do something like:

New -> BA work -> BA done -> Developer work -> Dev done -> Testing -> closed

Then you can set up your boards to only show the status the team for the board needs to see.

BA Board would include

• To-do: New
• In progress: BA work
• Done: would contain all the other status in the last column.

Dev board 

• To-do: BA Done
• In progress: Developer work
• Done: would contain dev done, testing and closed in the last column

Dev board 

• To-do: Dev Done
• In progress: Testing
• Done: Closed

This will keep everything in one workflow, keep velocity reporting working for any scrum boards, and represent your workflow for stories well.

You can still have other workflows if for example, you've got BA work that never needs to go to development.  You can tie those to different issue types and then map their status into the relevant board columns as well.

[Marisa Harwood]

Thank you, that's been really helpful. I thought I was going down the wrong route when I couldn't get things to work how I wanted them to. I'm keen to get the best out of Jira by following best practices and not fudge things and have to create work arounds later down the road.