Managing cross-project releases in Atlassian Jira

Jira is used by software teams during the development, testing and releasing projects. It supports the development in an Agile manner following Scrum or Kanban approach.

Test management, however, is not implemented as an out of the box solution and is covered by third-party apps. Quality is important, that is why several test management apps are top-selling on the Atlassian Marketplace.

Release management is another important step in software delivery flow which is implemented in the very basic level known as project versions. Let’s quickly recap how versions work.

Challenges with existing approaches

Versions have Start and Release dates to indicate when work on version started and completed.

A new version is created in the unreleased status. Changing its status to released usually means that the version was shipped to a client(s). However, there are many exceptions when it could also mean that the internal development is completed. In general, a release flow in different companies can vary significantly. As a result, teams should additionally agree what released status of a version particularly means.

Large projects are usually developed by more than one team. Quite often more than one Jira project is used to organize the work on the large products. Since versions are Jira project based there is no way to have a cross-project release in Jira out of the box. Different companies have to implement their own workarounds to organize the release management in such environments.

A popular workaround is to create a separate project where issues are mapped to versions. Issue links are used to implement relations between “issues-versions”. This approach works to some extent but has one major drawback — synchronization between issues-versions must be done manually. Automation is possible at the additional configuration overhead and growing maintenance complexity.

Release Management app as a solution

There should be an easier way to run release management in Jira. That’s why we created Release Management for Jira — a solution for multi-module cross-project release management — easy and efficient.

Running Jira Data Center?

Release Management for Jira is approved by Atlassian as Data Center compatible app.

Maybe Jira Cloud?

Release management for Jira Cloud is available as well.

Key features

Key features of the Release Management latest version 2.1 are:

• cross-project release boards
• version workflow
• release board permissions
• version comments
• version status history
• product releases
• timeline

Cross-project Release boards

When your product is developed in multiple Jira projects you can organize versions from those projects in a single Release board:

Version workflow

You can create custom versions workflow which works on top of built-in released/unreleased version statuses. Changing version status is as easy as drag-and-drop it from one column to another on a Release board:

Release board permissions

Release board can be shared with other users, groups or all users of selected projects using board permission settings:

Version comments

Users can add comments directly to a particular version to centralize communication about it:

Version status history

Find out who and when changed status of a version on a status change history tab and how long was the version in the source status:

Product releases

When your product consists of independently releasable modules you can group module versions into a Release and track its status with custom release workflow. Release workflow steps are configured independently from version workflow steps in the Release board configuration:

Timeline

Managing releases is not only about the status, but also when something will be ready. It is possible to manage statuses of versions and releases on a Kanban-like drag-and-drop board, but not Start and Release dates. We create Timeline — a time-centric view for versions and releases to address this.

Try it out

Release Management sandbox

Give Release Management app a try using out test Jira instance without installing it in your environment.

User name: demo, Password: demo

Start a free trial

Start a free 30-days trial to check how Release Management helps you.

Your feedback is important

Release management as a process is unique in almost every company. Our goal is to create a configurable solution suitable for as many use cases as possible.

We’d love to hear what you think via support@releasemanagement.app:

• how your release management process works
• how you use Jira to manage releases nowadays
• whether the Release Management app is useful in your setup or no (why)
• suggestions for new features and improvements

Useful links

• Release Management for Jira on the Atlassian Marketplace
• Release Management for Jira Server and Jira Datacenter documentation
• Release Management for Jira Cloud documentation
• Release Management demo Jira (demo/demo)