Typical Use Cases

Owned by Yuri
Last updated: Sept 23, 2023
2 min read

Virtual versions

There is a long list of possible uses cases for virtual versions, but let us list just a few from our experience:

Component versions

If you are still using a single Jira project for you development teams (Atlassian is suggesting to use project per team) you probably have multiple components to support in this project. Creating component specific versions on a single project might be cumbersome leading to a long list with difficult navigation.

We suggest to keep major versions as fixVersions and use virtual versions (by Components) in Release Management App. You can also package all of them (virtual versions) into Package along-side fixVersion for great visibility and tracking.

Sub-versions (minor versions and/or service releases)

Even if you are using a separate Jira Projects per team (responsible for group of services) organizing minor versions and/or service releases might be difficult. Nearly on the same reason as having multiple component versions under single Jira Project.

Suggestion is to organize minor versions as Virtual versions in Release Management App querying them by label / custom field / any other identifier you use … and package with major version if you want to see the whole flow. Or group in different package according to your business needs.

Using Epics (instead of versions)

In classic projects Epics had a powerful ability to be cross-project and combine Stories / Tasks from different Jira Projects. Thus a lot of people used it a good notion of “Feature“. Having Continues Delivery (CD) in place people were (still is) having fun delivering by Epics. This was also empowered with Jira Roadmap and other Roadmap-focused Apps.

Few challenges came with this approach:

  • FixVersion is not used and Jira Releases functionality is useless

  • Mary such approach with other parts of enterprise that are using more classical Release Management is nearly impossible (to build end to end visibility)

  • Epics became containers for non-feature related tasks - aka Deployment requests / jobs, Approval tickets for Change Management, etc.

Using virtual versions (either Epic-based or JQL based) allows you to integrate Epics seamlessly into Release Management process marrying it with other parts of organizations and/or keeping DevOps related activities separately from the product features.

Package several cross-project deliverables

Packages give an awesome opportunity to group few fixVersions into single cross-project delivery.

More use cases?

Help others to gain more from better from the App by sharing your use cases with us via Servicedesk Portal. We will review them and post most relevant on this page. Appreciate that.