Using JIRA to Manage reusable modules

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Many software products use external modules that are shared with other software products. The external projects are often managed separately, and have their own versions and life-cycles. So the question of how to "map" this scenario to JIRA often arises.

Currently, the best way to solve this in JIRA would be to create a separate JIRA project for each module and application. Then create issues in each JIRA project as needed and use issue linking to link related issues. Using Issue Links, issues can be easily linked across projects.

JIRA also has a clone issue function which can be used to copy an issue. The cloned issue can be then moved to another project. This should save the trouble of manually duplicating issues.

To get an idea of where each product and each module is "up to", JIRA's dashboard can be used. For example, one could place a portlet for each JIRA project that shows all open scheduled issues. This way the dashboard will provide an overview of all outstanding work for each project.

If all relevant issues for external modules have an issue in the product's JIRA project the standard reports and project summary panels (e.g. Change Log and Release Notes) should have all the information they need to be useful. Otherwise, JIRA can be extended by creating a custom project tab panel and/or a report that can look at more than one JIRA project and produce desired summaries. If you decide to write a custom report this tutorial should be useful.

In future we hope to better support this style of project organisation, eg. through shareable sub-projects (JRA-1072). Please vote/add your thoughts to the issue to increase its popularity. Also, please refer to this document which explains the way Atlassian schedules new features.

Last modified on May 2, 2012

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