How do you prioritize releases in Jira Portfolio
Asked by Thomas Vladeck:

Hi, I work with a team and we are using Jira Portfolio. We are using releases to organize our work in portfolio as it is the concept that maps most closely to our business. We have many projects and many releases in the works at any given time.

- We would like to prioritize releases so that Jira schedules those issues ahead of lower-priority issues.

- We need to be able to prioritize releases across projects without using cross-project releases.

Thank you!


Answers:
author: Earl McCutcheon
body: Hello Thomas,

To get the algorithm to Prioritize with the release as the primary factor you should be able to set the Releases start date as "Relative to previous release date" and the release date to "Dynamic release date", the main concern is to make sure the release date does not overlap with the start date of the next release.

Automatic release assignment only works if there is at least one release defined with a fixed end date, so if you have the releases dynamic you would want to manually assign the issues into releases.

Additional details on the algorithm and the prioritization can be seen in ["Scheduling behavior"](https://confluence.atlassian.com/jiraportfoliocloud/scheduling-behavior-828785428.html), and details on the releases can be seen in ["Configuring release dates"](https://confluence.atlassian.com/jiraportfoliocloud/configuring-release-dates-828785321.html).

Regards,  
Earl

comments: author: Thomas Vladeck
body: Earl, thank you, but that assumes that I have one track of releases, which I don't. I have several tracks of releases corresponding to different projects. I want to prioritize across projects by having one release for one project be more important than another release from another project, so the relative to previous release date is a non-factor here. How do I do this? Thanks.


author: Thomas Vladeck
body: Oh, and also, it's not that I don't want to manually assign issues. I want to manually assign issues to releases and then have the schedule use the priority of releases to schedule the issues, and I want a global priority of releases across my plan. How do I do that?


author: Earl McCutcheon
body: Hi Thomas,

Thanks for the additional details, Sprint assignment, Dependencies, Release assignment and Issue rank are the most important factor in issue prioritization, but this is at the issue level and can cross prioritization's between releases.

Within portfolio the prioritization efforts could be mix and matched with "Relative to previous release" "As Early as possible" or A "Fixed Date" to rearrange the releases for your desired layout, with a manual release association of issues to build out the plan. Primarily though if you Set a fixed release date on issues and then assign issue to the release this would prioritize issue based off the fixed date prioritization of the release as a leading factor for the time table

To expand on this however I would suggest checking out the app ["Cycle Control"](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1213200/cycle-control?hosting=server&tab=overview) which has a feature for automating release prioritization in portfolio, However this one is only available in Jira Server, and if you're on Jira Cloud I believe that ["Insight - Asset Management"](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1212137/insight-asset-management?hosting=cloud&tab=overview) also has a similar capability as well but I cannot verify if that is the case, as an alternate app choice to look into.

Regards,  
Earl


Tags: advanced-roadmaps

release