Multiple Team and Multiple Project/Product in JIRA

Yesterday, i read a beautiful article from Chris Gagné: Healthy Team Backlogs.

It’s all about how to make, organize, and manage our product backlog in a beautiful way. Honestly, it’s really helpful. You can implement some practices there. Let’s read that article then experiment it to your team.

But there’s a question from Chris Gagné in his article that quite makes me interested:

Scrum most commonly uses the term product backlog. However, many product owners who are new to Scrum are confused by this term. Reasonable questions arise: Does this suggest that a team working on multiple products would have multiple backlogs? If so, how do we prioritize between them? Where do bugs get recorded? What happens if work needs to be done, but it isn’t associated with a product; do we create a placeholder?

In this article i’m trying to answer that question in a summary. And my answer is: by using JIRA, how?

• First, let me explain 2 most important entity in JIRA: Project and Board.
  1. Project is group of several backlog that is grouped based on similarity (based on the author purpose).
  – Similarity is subjective. It can be based on team, theme, mission, KPI, etc.
  – Due to support this article purpose, i put project as a group of several backlog that has similarity: contribute to one product.
  

  Project not associated with board

  2. Board is place to visualize our project.

  

  Project that visualized by the board (DEMO board)

  – Relation between Project and Board is many to many (m-n), so: one project is able to connect with several boards, several project are able to connect with one board, etc. (i’ll explain about this later, let’s continue!).

• Second, let’s create 2 different project that represent 2 different product.
  – In this example, i created DEMO-1 and DEMO-2, let’s assume DEMO-1 & DEMO-2 are different product that our (full) tech-product team working on.
  

  Example of project

• Third, create several backlog for each project.
  – To make it more likely a real backlog, we can put an epic to represent every each product (represent by project) has prioritized epic.
  

  Project DEMO-1, please do the same to DEMO-2

Then, let’s answer Chris Gagné‘s question one by one..

• Does this suggest that a team working on multiple products would have multiple backlogs?
  Yes, multiple product can be represented by multiple project in JIRA. In this example: DEMO-1 and DEMO-2.
  
• How do we prioritize between them?
  By using filter on the board:
  – Let’s create 1 board that visualized our team board. In this example, i named the team as “DEMO”. So, i create “DEMO Team”.
  

  Create a board

  – Choose what’s project source of the board that we want to visualized. In this example, we choose “based on an existing project” since we already have the project (DEMO-1 & DEMO-2).

  

  Choose the source of the board

  – Put board name as DEMO Team (our team name) then put DEMO-1 & DEMO-2 as our combination of 2 project (product) that we want to visualized.

  

  Let’s name the board!

  Ta da! we’ll see board that contain both product backlog (from 2 different product) that we will be working on!

  

  Let’s prioritized!

  So, currently we’re able to prioritized between this combination of product backlog.

  Then, how to differentiate between which one is backlog from DEMO-1 and DEMO-2?
  – Actually each project has a key that you can setup when you created a new project. In this example, i put “DEMO1” as a key for backlog from DEMO-1 and “DEMO2” as a key for backlog from DEMO-2.

  

  Setup a key for every project

  

  DEMO1 & DEMO2

• Where do bugs get recorded?
  Before answer this question, i assume when the bugs is coming we easily to define the bug is coming from which product. So, for example the bug is coming from product DEMO-1. Then, yeah we just create a new bug that tight to DEMO-1 project.
  

  Create [BUG] DEMO G

  Board will also showing combination of each product (project) bug on the backlog, similar with the other backlog. Then, we are also able to set the bug priority and prioritize it along with the other backlog.
  

  Let’s prioritize the bug!

Finished!

Hope this article will help you to setup your JIRA for your team. I’ll share how HappyFresh tech-product team process in bug handling in the different article.

Here’s Atlassian documentation if you want to learn more.

See you!