Hello Frank,

Thank you for describing your setup. Implementing SAFe is definitely very interesting to us, we ourselves have been looking into figuring out the best way to do it with Structure.

If you don't mind, I'd like to reach out to you for feedback, when we have a preview version of Structure 3 with some ideas about SAFe implementation. If you'd have a testing server with the copy of your real data where you can play around with Structure 3 to see if it works for you, it would be fantastic!

Thanks!
Igor

Thank you for your reaction.

On alternative b), one custom field per structure is not a acceptable option. We are implementing SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) with Jira, so we use issue links to link portfolio backlog items to program backlog items and program backlog items to team backlog items. For this we have multiple structure boards: 1 for portfolio, 1 for each release train, and 1 for each development team. Currently this is about 8 structure boards per business unit. We have multiple business units, so we will have many structure boards.

Currently, we are not reporting the aggregated values because we cannot get them out of Jira. But we want to make reports about estimates on portfolio items based on the estimates of the issues on program and team level. Similarly for logged work. And we want progress on portfolio level based on the progress at program and team level.
We want to have the logged work aggregated on portfolio level to be able to capitalize (in money) the costs of each portfolio item.

Structure 3.0 supports multiple parents (or locations). We have not thought about that yet. But still a structure board will have Progress, Sum Estimate, Sum Remaining and Sum Logged Work columns, I presume, so I suppose you have given it some thought hoe to calculate those values.

Regarding JQL: a function like structure() would be great.

Frank, thanks for this feature request!

Regarding Reports:

The problem there is that reports are provided by JIRA itself or other plugins, which are not aware of Structure.

There are multiple paths to address this: a) make them work with Structure (requires effort from other vendors), b) synchronize aggregate values with some specially designated custom field, which will then be used by the reports, c) reimplement the reports that you need in Structure.

(b) seems the cheapest way (it will need a synchronizer or a custom calculated field), but it will require custom fields (and maybe one custom field per structure). Does that sound like an acceptable solution? Could you tell a bit more, which reports are you using the aggregates in?

By the way, since in Structure 3.0 the same issue can be in different spots at the same time, it might have different accumulated values! How would you like to see that work out in a report?

Regarding JQL:

There are narrow limits to how JQL can be extended, however, we can do that again via a custom field, or via a function similar to the current structure() JQL function.

Kind regards,
Igor