We’ve started using Jira and Confluence as a replacement for Xplanner (which we used for almost 2 years). Jira’s an extremely flexible issue-tracking software product which allows us to track Bugs, Projects, Sprints, and even Ticket queues (like internal email support) all in one place. We hope to be able to relate issues to one another and discover trends, bugs, and manage our software process more holistically.
The challenge has been defining the mapping between Jira’s entities and our business entities, mainly for managing the work in a given software sprint.
We’ve tried the following
Sprint: Version
Weekly Milestones: Due date
Category of change: Component
Type of task: Issue type
High-level task: Issue
Individual action in pursuit of high-level task: Sub-issue
This sprint we’re trying something different:
Sprint: Project
Weekly milestones: version
High-level task: component
Type of task: description
Individual action…: Issue
Both have their pros and cons, what I’d love to know is how others solve this and whether they might have any advice on how they’ve configured the entities in Jira, use Links, etc to manage their Agile development projects.
We’re on the lookout for tools to help us “scrumming”. What are your experiences with the products from Atlassian since your post almost 6 months ago?
/Peter
Peter,
We’ve continued to use Jira and Confluence. We’ve moved to using them more and more for the management of the Product Backlog rather than the day-to-day operations of the sprint. For the management of stories, tasks, and daily-scrums within the sprint we’ve gone low-tech with index cards, a wall, and printouts of the stories.
Here’s a photo of our developers along our BAC (big-ass chart):
Jira’s strength is its flexibility. Jira’s weakness is its flexibility. Once you set it up for your needs, it’s quite a powerful tool, but getting it setup and determining the way you’d like to map it to your process is the chief challenge.
-David