When integrating Productboard with Jira, you might want to be able to use the Release Timeline Roadmap type in Productboard without manually entering the dates in Productboard because this is all set up in Jira Sprints. This is useful when you rely on Sprint dates to keep track of issue releases rather than manually updating the start and end dates on epics and other issue types in Jira.
This is not natively possible in the integration due to the current limitation that Productboard does not support releases/fix versions date sync or sprints date sync.
As a result, the following workaround is required to set up this workflow for your integration.
In this article:
Proposed Solution
The proposed solution to help minimize the manual effort of updating the features and subfeatures timeframes in Productboard is to set up automation rules in Jira that allows for the issues in a sprint to inherit the sprint’s start and end dates.
As you work with sprints and the sprints have a specific time frame associated with them, the automation rule will be such that when a sprint is started, the issues within that sprint should take the values of the start date and end date from the sprint start and end dates.
This way, the time frames for Features and Subfeatures will be synced across Productboard and Jira, and they will show up in the appropriate time frames on the Roadmap.
The only manual task a product manager will have to do after this is to address any overlap or slippage of a feature or subfeature related to the release/sprint.
Considerations
To use the Release Timeline Roadmaps, releases must have a timeline associated with them, or at least the features within the release/sprint should have a timeframe set so that you can easily align the timeframe of your individual features with the timeframe of your overall release. When the features with timeframes set from Jira are synced in Productboard, you might end up with the scenario in the image below, where the features are on the right time horizons. Still, the Release / Sprint time frame is not automatically adjusted.
To address this overlap, you can adjust the timeframe of the release by double-clicking on the overlap or dragging and dropping the end of the release to align with the outlying feature (based on the time frame from Jira).
Prerequisite
To see your features and subfeatures' timeframes updated on the Roadmap in Productboard, you need to set up Field mapping and enable 2 way sync for Timeframe Start/End in the Jira integration.
Setting up the workaround
If you are a project administrator in Jira, you can go to project settings > Automation and then create a new rule. You can set up your rule to look like this:
- Add a new Trigger for “Sprint Started” and select the corresponding Board that you want to create this rule
- Add a new component and select New Branch and choose Branch rule / related issues.
- Select Issues in the Sprint in the dropdown. This means that we want to perform an action on all issues in the sprint, therefore the sprint should have been created first.
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This next step is created with the assumption that we only want to update issues with an empty start date (and possible end date, but this example does not show it).
Add a new component and select New Condition > Issue fields condition.
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For this step, we want to add the action of editing the start and due dates of all issues with the sprint.
To do this, Add a new component and select New Action > Edit Issue.
Choose the field to set “Start date” from the dropdown and enter the following {{issue.Sprint.startDate.format("yyyy-MM-dd")}}
Repeat the same process to edit Due Date and add the following {{issue.Sprint.endDate.format("yyyy-MM-dd")}} - Click Publish rule.
Testing
To test your automation, do the following:
- Create a new sprint and add issues with no start and end dates.
- Start the sprint and provide a Start and End date.
- Check the issues in the sprints to see if their start and end dates are now updated to the same values as the sprint.
- For any unexpected behaviors, check the audit log of your automation and click on show more for more information.