Quick-fire Agile Stories

Improved workflow during project setup / sprint planning within JIRA and Excel


Using Agile has been a big part of how we manage a project life cycle. Almost all our projects try to follow this methodology as it helps guide what needs to be done and give a lot of clarity about a projects state.

A key tool we use to help during the Agile process is JIRA. This allows us to organise sprints, plan what needs to be done and give a clear overview of the current project / sprint progress at any one time.

This article will explain how you can improve your workflow so that getting your scrum board in JIRA setup is a lot easer when you use Excel and follow some basic guides.

The problem


Part of the Agile process involves us as a group planning what needs to be done for the next sprint. This normally means we will identify user stories, listing tasks to get the user stories done and estimating how long things will take. We often find ourself estimating a project in Excel and then later needing to duplicate this data into JIRA.

Excel is a great tool to quickly list task, assign times and get a total (hours / days needed), especially when your using Google Docs to share and collaborate with others. Either during the project kick off or during the planning sessions its much easier to do this than write them directly into JIRA first.

However when you start the project you will need this same data in JIRA, luckily JIRA allows for importing data.

The Workflow


During any planning stages of the project we use an Excel template, that allows us to clearly list:

  • Story titles
  • Tasks associated with that story
  • Task assignees
  • Time estimates
  • Descriptions
Example speed-sheet with stories and tasks listed. This gets converted to a CSV file and then imported into JIRA.

Once your ready this Excel document can then be converted to a CSV file and then imported into JIRA. Converting an Excel document in Google Docs is done by going to File > Download as > comma-separated values. Once you have downloaded the file its ready to be imported into JIRA.

Importing into JIRA


Within JIRA you can import data by going to ‘Administration > System > External System Import’.

This should open a Import external projects page, where you can import files from multiple sources. In our case you will need to click the CSV option.

JIRA allows data to be imported from multiple sources.

Follow the on screen instructions selecting the file you want to import and the project it should be imported too. You shouldn’t need to change any of the default setting like E-mail Suffix for New Users or Date format.

Map fields


JIRA will ask you to map the CSV Fields to JIRA Fields. This is basically so JIRA knows what the data in each column from the CSV file represents. Go down the list selecting the JIRA Field value so it matches the CSV Field value. E.g the first CSV Field to be imported should be ‘Assignee’. So select ‘Assignee’ in the JIRA Field. Note : The only field that doesn't need importing is Time (hours) — Set this too ‘Don’t map this field’.

Map the CSV fields to the JIRA fields. All fields need to be matched apart from ‘Time (hours)’

Once your ready click continue and then press the ‘Begin Import button’. You should now see some progress bars shows the data being imported and a message telling summering the import.

When the import is done you will see a message like this.

Done


All thats left is to check that the data got imported correctly. Within your project you should see the Stories and within each Story any Sub-Tasks you created.

Within my Test Project you can see the 2 Stories that were imported and the Sub-Tasks.