As a team we wish to make good use of JIRA to plan, manage and report on work during WIP II, while also allowing a shared view across the core team as well.. The following are some thoughts or insights as to how we might make good/better use of it, with a special focus on the high level analysis phase. I expect we will need to revisit this when we enter the proper development phase.
- Expressing requirements in the user stories format is desirable, as it drives a user focus throughout all activity.
- However, much of the work during this phase does not easily lend itself to a user story, so lets not force it into this form just for the sake of doing so.
- As such, tasks (as the same level as story in Jira) are likely to be the main "activity container" for this phase, with some of tasks having multiple project tasks underneath.
- Estimate and log work at the lowest task level available (either project (or sub) tasks where they exist, if not then at the task level.
- We are committed to writing stories and tasks such that they can be started and finished within a sprint (a good habit to form for the development phase for reasons of velocity, motivation, tracking, etc)
- Epics are blocks of larger activity that are larger than a story or task (i.e. will cross multiple sprints). It may be possible to break them down into stories (sometimes down at a latter date) or they may be based on a goal or outcome (improve web ranking by X) that requires time to measure/prove.
- They may be than represent a collection of stories and/or tasks (and all the associated project/sub tasks) that either have not yet been broken down into stories