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JIRA (Business Tool)

Owned by Nathan Wailes
Last updated: Aug 23, 2016
3 min read

How to organize things in JIRA

  • This is the structure of JIRA AFAIK:
    • Project Category → Project → Epic → Story → Task → Sub-Task
  • Now, off the top of my head, I don't see why they don't just adopt Confluence's model of 'Everything is a page, and pages can have children'.
  • One thing that's noticeable is that different levels of the existing JIRA hierarchy have different features: You can do things with Projects that you can't do with Sub-Tasks, and vice-versa.
  • Thus, it may be the case that the way you should organize things in JIRA depends on the features you need access to at different levels of your work (eg 'Be Happy' vs. 'Look up the phone number for that guy.').

 

Learning resources

  • 2014.04.21 - Introduction to JIRA & Agile Project Management
    • 2:00 - He shows how he used MS Project to plan Thanksgiving dinner.
    • 3:00 - He shows his personal JIRA instance.
    • 4:30 - Agile was designed to try to make long software projects adapt to the real world faster.
      • He goes through while people use agile.
    • 6:50 - Creating tasks
      • "What's a task?"
        • 7:55 - "Anytime you're waiting, that's probably not a task".
        • 8:15 - "It takes more than 30 minutes, but less than 3 days." (He doesn't do a task that's more than 1 day)
          • If it takes less than 30 minutes, it's probably a waste to write it down.
        • 9:00 - Challenge 2: But I'm waiting
          • Anytime you're waiting, it's probably a series of tasks
        • 10:00 - Challenge 3: How Long Will It Take?
          • JIRA uses the concept of story points, which are doubling numbers
          • Story point cheating: 30 mins is 1 story point, 1 hr is 2 points, etc.
        • 11:30 - They tried to move away from hour estimates because if a task is labeled as taking 1 hr and it takes someone 1.5 hrs, managers say "Hey you're working too slow."
        • Make sure your team has roughly the same concept of what a story point is.
    • 13:20 - Scrum vs. Kanban (this is really good)
      • For Scrum, the date is more important
      • 14:40 - Kanban doesn't have a due date. It's a prioritized list as fast as you can.
    • 15:30 - He shows an actual screen
      • 16:15 - An epic is like a theme for a bunch of tasks. It's like a tag.
    • 18:10 - You drag the stuff you want to do in the next sprint.
      • Two weeks is a good sprint length.
    • 19:10 - You can link issues in JIRA
    • 20:40 - He creates his epics first (top-down)
      • He gives examples of his epics
    • 21:50 - He shows "Work Mode"
    • 23:00 - He describes "Workflow"
    • 24:20 - He has a waiting task as a separate task from the actual work he needed to do.
    • 25:25 - His #1 priority is that he doesn't want tasks in his "in progress" column that he's not working on.
    • 25:30 - Q: How do you deal with subtasks?
    • 28:00 - Burndown
    • 30:35 - It's useful to have your burndown graph on a big screen.
    • 31:00 - Q: How do you deal with stuff taking longer than we thought?
      • I couldn't make sense of his answer.
    • 33:50 - Q: How do you deal with interruptions?
      • You factor that into your estimates.
    • 35:50 - He shows the dashboard
    • 39:20 - Q: Is there a mobile app?
    • 40:20 - Q: How do Confluence tasks relate to JIRA?
      • 41:20 - Very useful - He explains Atlassian's idea for how teams will use Confluence and JIRA together.
  • Using JIRA and Confluence for Agile Software Development
    • 7:30 - One of the main ways they use Confluence is for Application Design
      • They also use it for Meeting notes and collaboration
      • They also use the blog feature
      • They also use it for application support
      • They use it for Team information, calendars, etc. (What we use Google docs for)
    • 17:20 - Switch to Ryan, who works at Atlassian
      • 18:50 - "As a (User), I Want (Objective) So that (Why)"
    • 20:20 - Confluence-JIRA integration
    • 21:55 - He gives links to more info about how to run product management with Confluence/JIRA
    • 22:30 - 2. Build boldly
      • Something about "spiking"?
    • 24:10 - Sprints
      • They've played around with their sprint lengths.
      • Most teams at Atl are doing 1-2 week sprints
    • 25:20 - Demos
    • 26:40 - Blueprints
      • 28:19 - Retrospectives blueprint
    • 29:26 - Using blogs
    • 32:00 - They use Confluence to discuss code

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