What is the best way to manage a project using a scrum board for dev and a kanban board for deploy?

[Adam]

Hi everyone. My team practices scrum, with one week sprints and is currently using a single scrum board to manage development, testing and all deployments. We're of the opinion that it would make more sense to split part of our deployment process out to a kanban board that in essence runs parallel to sprints.  

For additional context on our project, our definition of done for a sprint is deploying to our staging environment, which is virtually identical to production. So it makes sense for the last column on this board to be Staging. If you’re wondering where QA & UAT comes into the picture it is by way of using review apps on heroku…we QA and UAT on our review apps so that work is already tested and accepted before it goes to staging. Staging equalling done is pretty important for us because once work is approved for staging we bill our client.

Having the scrum board work as above leaves us needing to carefully manage the flow of work from staging to production. We’d like maximum visibility on what is on staging and what has been deployed all the way to production. Our solution to this is to create a separate Kanban board that picks up where the scrum board ends. This new new board would have the following columns: "STAGING", "READY FOR PRODUCTION", "PRODUCTION”. This first staging column would effectively replicate the last column on the scrum board and this happens automatically if the status of this staging column is the same as the status on the last column on the scrum board. We are then able to manage the deployments to production outside of the sprint, using this Kanban board. 

So the question is, when I close a sprint on a scrum board that does not have “DONE” as the status mapped to the last column, what will happen? Will all work in that column reflect as done on the reports (which is what we want)? Or will everything get messed up? We need our sprint reports to still make sense. 

Would everything work better if the last status on the scrum board and first status on the kanban board is "DONE" and I create a new status for the Production column on the kanban board - perhaps "DEPLOYED TO PROD"?

Looking forward to your insights. 

[Crystelle S]

Aware that this particular question is a bit old. JIRA looks at any ticket, regardless of the Status = Done as still "in play" if there is no resolution set. JIRA also calculates that if your last column on a board is reached with a status in which you put your tickets, it is "Done" for velocity calculation (on that board). My thoughts are this:

• yes, the end column on your scrum board should be the end of that board's statuses. You can map a "green" "deployed to staging" status in the ticket workflow to "Done" on the scrum board. Constrain your query if it helps to remove older tickets in that 'deployed to staging' status from this board
• You can choose to use a kanban board or even another scrum board to pick up all the tickets in the "Deployed to staging" status and move it through your remaining steps - make sure "Deployed to PROD" is in the right-most column on that board. For good measure, auto-update the resolution upon selecting the change to that status to "complete" the ticket from JIRA's perspective