JIRA & Agile

A crash course

Agile Rules Concepts

 

• Breaking large tasks into smaller ones.
• Expect and welcome changing requirements.
• Transparency.
• Working software as the main measure of progress.
• Design, product and engineering collaborating daily.
• Incremental, not sequential development.
• Empowered, self-organizing teams.
• Lots of ways to do agile (lean, kanban, scrum), pick the one that works best for your team.

http://www.agilemanifesto.org
http://www.agilemanifesto.org/principles.html

Don't stress out about being perfectly agile, because no team is !

JIRA is

 

Issue tracker

Agile Project Management Tools

Source of Truth

JIRA answers these questions:

What are the issues and tasks?

Who is working on what?

What is the estimate?

What are the priorities?

Is quality improving?

How long does this task usually take?

Is anyone blocked by something outside their control?

Data Relationships in JIRA

Software Development

• Projects
  • Epics
    • Stories
    • Bugs
    • Tasks/Subtasks
• Bugs

Task Management

• Projects
  • Tasks/Subtasks
  • Requests

High Quality Bug Reports

Summary

A few sentences describing the issue.

Steps to Reproduce

What steps can others take to see this issue?

Expected Results

What are you expecting to happen?

Actual results

What is the actual result of the steps to reproduce?

Workarounds

Is there a way to workaround this?

Screenshots and Linking to Related Issues.

 

Epic Examples

Spotify Integration on profile views.

 

Filtering profile based on user defined criteria.

 

Login without Facebook.

 

Windows Mobile Client

 

Stories

As a <type of user or stakeholder>

 

I want <desired feature or change>

 

So that I can <benefit>.

Tasks/Subtasks

• Task: Write unit tests for authentication
  • ​Subtask: Refactor auth code.
  • Subtask: Write unit tests for all public methods.
  • Subtask: Make Jenkins run tests on a schedule.

Estimates

Text

Scrum

• Planning and date centric.
• Estimation.
• Deadlines.
• Sprints.
• Retrospectives.

Kan Ban

JQL DEMO

Dashboards Demo

Other Good Practices

• Use blocked status when you're blocked
• @Tag other users so they get notified. 
• Err on the side of discussions happening in JIRA comments vs. email.
• Keep it pithy.
• Keep issues updated.
• Regularly