projects architecture

[AT]

Hi everybody,

i'm working at setting up JIRA and JIRA agile for multiple dev teams, i'm starting with one scrum team but i'm not totally sure on how to create my projects, here is our needs :

• we want to manage our dev backlog
• we want to manage our bugs
• we want to collect new dev queries by users

Should i create one agile scrum project to manage this or do you think it might better to create several (one to manage scrum and another for the dev queries for example) ?

Thanks very much,

[John RB]

Nic Brough,

I realize this is an old thread, but was pleased to find it, particularly this statement you made (and I agree with): "A board is a representation of pieces of work that a team needs to work on.  So keep the scrum boards based purely on teams.  They can get issues from many projects, so you can easily have teams that only work in one project, with other teams working across many."

Ok, so we have boards per team, pulling issues from multiple projects, but it's still important to have some kind of a board or view for the entire project itself, right? After all, somebody might create an issue and forget to assign it and it just sits there in the project backlog until assigned, then shows up in the respective team's board.  And i can and have set up both KanBan and Scrum boards for this purpose. But I don't like either one of them: Kanban boards are just not suitable for displaying a large backlog in a readable view.  A scrum board works, but that "Create Sprint" button is sitting there and every team leader is a project admin and they accidentally hit that button sometimes, when we ONLY wanted them to create sprints in their actual project boards, right?  So how do you recommend we view the project backlog?  Is there any other kind of view?  Or can we disable the "create sprint button" somehow?  I only want that button active on the TEAM boards, not the PROJECT boards.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Think of boards and projects as separate things.

A project is a good way to gather together piles of related issues.  This could be a logical project as in "stuff we need to do over the next few months to achieve X", or it could represent a product your organisation produces, or it could be a stream of work.  It can make sense to have a project for each team as well.  And you could divide it by type of work too.

A board is a representation of pieces of work that a team needs to work on.  So keep the scrum boards based purely on teams.  They can get issues from many projects, so you can easily have teams that only work in one project, with other teams working across many.

So, for your case, you'll want to think about what a project represents.  Then have one scrum board per team. 

Without knowing more about your actual process and how you want to work, one thing I'd suggest thinking about is how you want to handle incoming bugs/support.  It could make sense to have "bug" and "incident" type issues in a single "product" style project, but it might be a lot better to have a pair of projects for each product - support type stuff (visible to users) in one project, and development stuff in another (and only used by developers).  Then one board going across both projects enables the developers to plan and execute.

[AT]

Hi Nic, thanks very much for your reply. There is just one thing i don't understand very well : for me, the way to create an agile board is creating a project using "scrum software development" template, is it the right way ? If yes, how can i access a demand from another projet within my agile project. Thanks again ...

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yes, that's an excellent way to get started with a new process. But the hand-holding "do it from a template" thing does sort of stop you from being exposed to the full flexibility in there. Best bet that helps you see it: - Create the project from the template - Go to the board and click "configure" - On the main tab, look for the Board filter (the default from the template will be something quite simple like "Project = X order by rank" - Edit the filter and add more projects - I usually go for "Project in (X, Y, Z) order by rank"

[AT]

ok, so you have an agile project where you can see and modify demands from other projects. Do you manage your "development stuff" directly in the agile project or do you manage it in another project too ? Thanks

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Development stuff goes in a relevant project. The model I described was for hiding the development stuff from the users, but you don't have to do it that way. All I'd say is that you should not be trying to manage things in more than one place. If an item needs doing, don't duplicate it somewhere else!

[supportc]

to manage the dev backlog we recommend the JIRA addon Agile User Story Map: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.bit.agile.bit-storymap/cloud/overview