As a team we wish to make good use of JIRA to plan, manage and report on work during WIP II. The following are some thoughts or insights as to how we might make good/better use of it during the high level analysis phase, while acknowledging that the way in which we use it might change for later 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 task level.
- Lets try hard to ensure that any story or task can be delivered within a sprint (a good habit to form for the development phase for reasons of velocity, motivation, tracking, etc)
- Epics are larger 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