How to automate roadmaps with Roadmap Portal for JSD?
- Anand Inamdar
Automation
One of the challenges for product managers is to maintain an up to date product roadmap. If the roadmap is public, then that becomes a bit more difficult with customer scrutiny coming into play. Most of the Roadmap softwares fail at the point when they need too much manual intervention just to stay up to date.
Roadmap portal for Jira Service Desk addresses this problem in a smart way.
Life of the product manager becomes a tad bit easy since Roadmap cards can be auto-updated based on software development status in Jira. One doesn't need Zapier or any other such tool to achieve this. Native no code automation feature in Jira/Jira service desk is more than sufficient.
Custom Field or Status?
At the end of the day the Roadmap portal shows cards which are Jira issues.
As explained here, each column retrieves issues based on configured JQL query. Now if you are aware of how JQL works, you would know that one can retrieve issues based on one or more of their attributes (default as well as custom ones).
Thus you can pull the issues using JQL based on any default or custom attributes or even a combination of multiple such attributes.
For example, our roadmap portal for Roadmap portal app uses following JQLs (only 3 of them are listed here, but you’ll get the idea).
Add-on = "Roadmap Portal for JSD" AND "Roadmap Status" = "To do"
Add-on = "Roadmap Portal for JSD" AND "Roadmap Status" = "ready for dev"
Add-on = "Roadmap Portal for JSD" AND "Roadmap Status" = "Live"Issue Linking
Typical workflow for a roadmap item would look like below -
Feature request is created
It gathers votes/comments
Product team decides to implement the requested feature
Linked issue is created in a Jira software project where dev team works on relevant tasks
Once the Jira software issue is complete, corresponding feature request in JSD is updated
For example, we have created a separate type of link - Develops & Is developed by. So a feature request in JSD will be developed by linked issue in Jira software project.
Jira Service Desk Automation
Based on the linking, we have created automation rules. Check the images below.
We have such automations for all roadmap statuses. So whenever a linked issue moves to a different status, corresponding item on the roadmap can move automatically to appropriate tab & column.
