If Jira is used as some kind of notepad, throwing tasks as they come, after which the project turns into a pile in the backlog with a terrible description (if there is one at all) — then it’s time to deal with this…
Immediately, I’ll say that there won’t be anything new here for experienced atlases. I won’t delve into the intricacies of setting up each point either, but I’ll try to briefly describe the first block of important things, understanding and setting up which can make people’s work much more convenient.
1. Why Jira?
A little background. I had the opportunity to work for more than 2–3 months with all the popular project management systems — redmine, trello, basecamp, merlin (also known as MS Project) and Jira.
Of course, they all have their pros and cons, but what I liked about Jira specifically:
- simple and convenient time tracking and tracking it within the project
- filtering and graphs for monitoring anything
- a huge range of plugins and integrations that allow you to connect almost any tool
- quite flexible customization and settings (although, of course, there are limits)
- good documentation and support
- as a result, it is possible to tailor the system to your own needs, which is especially important for large teams and projects with a lot of stakeholders
2. WorkFlow Scheme
Workflow schemes allow you to set different workflows for one project depending on the types of tasks. For example, a complex workflow is needed for Story tasks, passing through several departments and different checks, while for R&D tasks and Bugs everything is much simpler. Therefore, in order to properly organize the scheme, you need to thoroughly study the types of tasks you have, and then combine tasks that follow the same scenario and “formalize” this process.
As a result, for example, it may look like this:
- Story — goes through all the steps, many and complex
- Bug — fewer steps
- Technical task — not a bug, but a technical task, in which the design department does not participate
- R&D — a task with the simplest workflow, created for ordering work (so that it can be planned in a sprint and accordingly tracked and monitored)
- Sub-tasks — for decomposition of Story
3. Workflow
Based on a properly described workflow in Jira, you can automate a lot of useful things, as well as separate the boards of different departments and task visibility.
For example, this is how the workflow for stories looks:
The left part of the diagram is the steps of the design department. In this workflow, there is also a step that frees developers from the problem of “not quite ready for development” design — the “in dev/test review” step, where leads review the design and discuss it with the design department, so that by the time the task is taken in the sprint, everyone is confident that everything is feasible and ready to be taken in the sprint.
The right part is the steps of the development and testing department. It also has one step for designers — “design review” on which designers check how well the developers have tried and made the work exactly according to the layouts. Such a workflow allows you to divide department boards within one project so that designers do not see either sprints or task cards in the “in dev” or “in test” columns, but only see the “design review” column and the “done” column.
As a result, we have a clear and transparent process that allows us to track progress and identify bottlenecks in the workflow.
4. Transitions
Transitions provide transitions between the statuses of tasks — these are the buttons that your colleagues see in the Detail View of any task. As part of the transitions, I usually monitor:
1. redundancy of transitions. It is important to have the same transitions, because then it is easier to automate and tune up the processes
2. Screen. This is a modal window which is displayed when a transishen is performed. These are the same prompts, so people don’t forget to log the time / write a comment / attach something / link, etc.
3. Options. This part contains a lot of useful features for automating processes:
- Post functions — allow you to automate the transfer of the task to the right person automatically, clear the right fields, fix some data, etc. I advise you to study these features carefully.
- Triggers — allow you to automatically translate tasks into the right statuses by integrating into Jira, GitHub/etc. Most of the time guys forget to put some task into work, but this way jira will put it “into work” itself when a branch is created with the specified task in the title.
In general, you can find useful things in each of the transit options, and a lot can be added there by installing addons from the marketplace. A little more about add-ons in step 6.
5. Separating boards by departments
Separate statuses for tasks in different departments but with the same meaning “in design progress” and “in progress” are needed to be able to separate boards for departments. To do this, you create several boards. Then, in the General board settings, you configure the filter that the board works with. You limit the statuses in which tasks will be displayed on the board. For example, like this:
In this way, in the same project, different departments can only see the tasks they need to work on. No extra buttons, tasks, and doubts whether this task is for us? At the same time, if a task already in the development sprint enters the “design review” status, it will appear on the designers’ board. It is difficult not to notice that something new has happened — the designation of the sprint in which this task is located and the task itself.
6. Atlassian marketplace and integrations
There are many useful add-ons that work only on Jira, which is on your server, not in the cloud, but there are also many cool plugins for cloud Jira that make work more pleasant and faster, for example:
Tempo Timesheets — time trackers, convenient timesheet report, Jira desktop addon, all this can be obtained thanks to tempo. Jira Misc Workflow Extensions — an extension that adds many useful and necessary things to post functions in transitions. Facilitates workflow automation ScriptRunner for Jira — it’s all clear here, JQL scripts in transitions for more “deep” and non-trivial automation, in case you didn’t find what you needed in the previous extension. Portfolio — don’t want to build a roadmap manually? Set up the tasks properly in Jira and Portfolio will do it for you. And so on, the list is actually huge, go to https://marketplace.atlassian.com/ and see for yourself :)
In addition to everything else, there are integrations with Slack, Git, Testrail and a bunch of other things.
Epilogue
Of course, all of these tools and tips are just the tip of the iceberg of what Jira is capable of. But even with these basics, you can already do a lot and organize your work much more efficiently.
