10

This is a bit of a broader question, but I hope this is the right place to ask.

I think I need to provide a bit of backstory regarding my goals. We tried several different PM solutions (Wrike - interface was somewhat lacking, Redbooth - good UI but not really good for managing software). Jira seems like the next best choice - so we can keep track of releases and different types of software that produced (integrations with Github etc. seem particularly useful).

Is there a comprehensive guide that would explain how to use Jira - both conceptually (most important) and practically. I found some courses on Jira but they all mix intro heavily with Agile, which would be too much to consume (introducing both Agile and new PM suite at once).

2

5 Answers 5

5

If your team is small and you're not using Agile yet, have you considered just using Github's issues? You can set up "issues" as to do items, label the items, and then categorize the items into milestones. So, for a while, we were setting up milestones for weekly releases. We'd put issues inside of those milestones, and those issues would be either labeled as bugs to be fixed or enhancements to be made and would be assigned an owner/software engineer to actually handle the issue. Once the issue was ready to go through testing, the software eng would mark it with a new label, "test". Once the QA person tested it and passed it, they would close the issue. If they didn't pass it, they'd put a bug on it. When your engineers are committing to Git, they can mark the issue as well with #id.

If your team is big, then this won't work.

4

Have a look at the Atlassian University. They have pretty good training materials for all their products including Jira without the Agile plugins.

The Self-Paced Training for Jira are free since September 2014: https://university.atlassian.com/uac/2.0/courses/end-user/jira/v60

They also offer online training with an instructor up to groups of 12 people: https://www.atlassian.com/purchase/training?classId=710417114

4

We have been using JIRA at Organization level i.e. all the projects which are being developed or maintained by my Organization use JIRA (90% of them, only a few projects are excluded where the client has provided TFS or some other tool for project management. Those projects are not using JIRA, else it would be a double effort).

I have been personally using it in the last couple of years (since my organization bought the license).

  1. It is a very good tool, if you are considering it for Project Management perspective. You can create Tasks, New Features, CRs, Bugs and Defects in JIRA and track them all to closure. It is not a good tool for Test case management, although it provides the same but compared to other tools it needs some improvement in that area (which our project have faced) but then we didn't use it more for Test case management.
  2. Good feature which I like about JIRA is the Dashboard which it provides i.e. you can built up a custom dashboard of your own choice and then share it with the whole team. In this way the complete team will have access to the same Dashboard and anyone can see, how many issues and tasks are pending with which person. We use this Dashboard in our Daily Status meetings to see the health of the project.
  3. It supports Agile, Kanban, Waterfall models of SDLC. With the installation of few plugins the kind of tracking provided by JIRA for Agile and Kanban is very good looking and easy to use.
  4. One of its plugins known as 'Tempo' is very helpful, if you want to maintain the timesheets over this tracker. Using this plugin every team member can fill his/her own timesheet with x numbers of hours/minutes spent in A, B, C tasks with different activities. This sounds a little bit confusing but is very helpful when one needs to generate cost reports (especially for higher management) i.e. How much time was spent in Coding, Rework, Testing over a Sprint cycle or over a month?
  5. JIRA Administrator can customize JIRA for even field level permissions, so that if your JIRA is client shared (which is possible and has been implemented in some project where the client doesn't have its own tracker) then your not-allowed fields will not be shown to the client or other users.
  6. Workflows and fields can be customized to any level and hierarchical issues can be created e.g. one can create a user story and then divide the same into tasks and create a parent child hierarchy so that all the sub-tasks are grouped under one user story. You will see its benefit when you have to provide the status of a User Story, then if child tasks are grouped then you don't need to track each and every story individually i.e. saving of the effort.
  7. JIRA has its own wiki and some features where you can use it as a information sharing center, where multiple users across different projects of the organization can share their knowledge and comment on tasks and issues.
  8. One more big advantage is that many automation tools provide integration with JIRA like Test Studio, Selenium, Test Complete etc. so that you can create your failed test cases or bugs directly over the JIRA tracker without manual effort.
  9. Performance wise too this tool is good, as we are using it for more than 150 projects and still faced very minor to zero performance issues with JIRA (except the case when you download the reports for all projects which our company does once in a quarter)
  10. JIRA task IDs can be integrated with TFS so that during code Check-In, one has to specify the Task or Bug ID for which he/she is committing the code. Which later on helps a lot in traceability.

Using JIRA as a project management tool is very easy and good experience for me (I have used some other tools like TFS, HPQC, Team pulse).

Other than the mentioned plugins a lot are available in market for integration with JIRA.

2

Brother,

I went through similar situation. Did a lot of research on Jira deployments, read blogs, and more.

The best way to know the tool I found was involved part of my agile team. I used the free period (30 days) and thoroughly tested the tool.

Even I had great impressions of it. We want to deploy Jira soon!

Helped?

0

I just launched a new video that attempts to do just this: A New Introduction to Jira & Agile Project Management

It also features Jira's new interface so you're not stuck with old screenshots that are no longer relevant. I do discuss a small amount of the differences between Scrum & Kanban, but I hope that you'll find that it doesn't get too much into the weeds there. It just gives you enough to figure out what board type to use and how to get Sprints started (if you choose Scrum).

I hope this helps! Please let me know if there are things that are still unclear.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.