The New Jira - how can I handle several projects in one board?

[Charlotte Arndt Munthe]

In the New Jira it seems that 1 project = 1 board, is it somehow possible to create a board with several projects?

We are a development team working on maintaining 8 apps (4 iOS and 4 Android) and we have created a project for each app, hence we have 8 projects. We have a scrum board for the iOS developers, which consists of the 4 iOS projects and a similar scrum board for the Android developers consisting of the 4 Android boards.

We run sprints and we always have tasks for all the apps in the sprints. How do we create a board for the developers using the New Jira? The developers all work on all projects so we need one board to run the backlog and the sprints for our apps...

Any ideas?

[Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist] · Accepted solution]

project and boards still have a many to many relation. You can create a board pointing to many projects or you can multiple boards in the same project.

In your case, you can create a board and pick multiple projects while doing that or create a filter that is required and use the filter while creating a board.

You might want to do the later if you want to filter issues based on other fields like teams or components or something else.

[Charlotte Arndt Munthe]

Thanks a lot :-)

[Alex Blanton]

So, I am not clear here - would that mean we would have to setup a new project just to hold the aggregated board and then have the sprint team use that board? Seems a bit round about way to give the team access to a multi-project board ...

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

No, you can create boards from existing filters or projects, you don't have to create a new project.

[Alex Blanton]

Okay - but where does the board live now if not inside one of the existing web site projects? It's going to be a little odd to have everyone go to one of many web site projects to manage all the other project boards.

[Guy Amit]

I'm also having the same situation - the new JIRA is not clear about that.  if I understand correctly, JIRA is actually saying that a Board is per Project.  what does it mean ?  should I combine similar projects to one project, but how should I differentiate  between the products? by components?

Yes, I know I can do the work around, but it doesn't seem to be recommended way by JIRA.

[Alex Blanton]

So, I have gone in circles on this and have resigned myself to the reality that JIRA does not have a flexible way to allow one team to handle multiple projects. We tried to create a JIRA board and setup a query that pulled in all the projects into the team board, but then we could not manage releases, versions and components from a single project. I think JIRA as set things up this way so that the only way to manage this is to buy their Portfolio project so you can use their "cross-project releases" function. It is in their best interest to keep things this fragmented I guess. So, we have abandoned having separate projects, and just load everything into one massive project and filter it all based on labels between the different teams and project groups. It is totally ridiculous, but it is the only thing that works at this point, unless you can assign a different team to each project. My point is, there is no longer a realistic way in JIRA to have a board that spans projects because the rest of JIRA breaks apart on this approach.

[Luca Miceli]

from yor project view of the issue navigator Simply use a JQL filter that involvese all the projects you need:

Click on "Board"->"Configure"

Filter Query project = ("Proj 1" OR "Proj n")  ORDER BY Rank ASC

[Guy Amit]

Yes, I know that.  but the view is for a different project.  lets say that I'm in "Android App" project while the board is assigned to "iOS App" project.   so I need to be in the screen of "iOS App" project all the time, so I can see the board.  it doesn't sound native to me.  is that mean JIRA wants us to maintain board per project ?

[Alex Blanton]

We setup a project just to house one of our development teams - call it Alpha Team - and use a merged project board of all their project work. However, in JIRA you will have to go into each project separately to manage versions, epics, and components. I think this is a fatal flaw as the reality is we have versions, epics and components that span projects and teams, but there is no way to manage this in JIRA.

[Guy Amit]

Yes , I fully understand that point.  its seems to me that any solution is not clean.

[Luca Miceli]

Guy Amit, board are visible from a project view if the board contains at least an issue of that project. Try this workaround. Add a dummy issue of the project you want to see the board from, in your board filter

[Guy Amit]

Not in the new JIRA Experience.  now, there is a new configuration in the Board settings named "Location" that defines the project that own the board, and it is visible only from there.

[Luca Miceli]

Ok. So sorry. I don't have any solution for now