Requirements Tracking in Jira for "Preliminary Project Assessment"

Question

Recently our company has taken the plunge into using Atlassian for our project management tool. Right now we're using Jira and Confluence. As an architect at our company, one of the things I've begun to maintain is something we call a "Preliminary Project Assessment." This includes very high level project components, risks, assessments, notes, things we will be ignoring for this project and estimates. Specifically, the components are technically formed chunks of work. For example, a component would be "create new mobile application."

Once the scrum teams kick off, they're working off the user stories and breaking them off into tasks. What I'd love to have is a nice way to map the user story back to the larger components they effect. Hopefully this will not only help me with traceability, but will also help the team easily get back to my initial thoughts on the piece.

Today we've got all of our users stories and sprints captured in Jira but this document in box. Before I go through and start adding super terse comments into each story, does anyone else have a thought on how I can use the Atlassian suite of products to help achieve what I'm looking for? Above and beyond that, does anyone have experience adding traceability from initial project planning down to the tasks the team executes on?

Answer 1

Jira has an issue type called an "epic". When you create new user stories, you can link them to an epic. The epic / story categorization is intuitively presented and displayed on the Jira Agile board.

If you want to report only on the Jira issue "component", using the search and filter capabilities, and then if need be, exporting to xls, is an approach that, perhaps not elegant, generally works for me.

Traceability is an interesting topic. I've traced tests to stories (Requirements) by just typing in the issue id(s) of the story(ies) within the parent test issue (using Zephyr). The same concept applies to other types of issues you want to trace. Similarly, you can "link" issues. I've found it all somewhat a crude solution though, in terms of getting clear visualization. Another approach for traceability might be a two-dimensional gadget on your dashboard. These are great.

Answer 2

I've adopted a system where I am using Jira portfolio to map out the initiative in high level Initiative->EPIC->Story hierarchy. This can come from a traditional project plan or a story mapping exercise, using Post-its.

I attach the EPIC->Story list to a project that I've labeled "Feature Grooming". We then put this through a workflow of Stakeholder Review, Engineering Review, then "ready for prioritization". There is also a Parking Lot, for issues we decide not to assess at this time.

I then move the tickets from the Feature Grooming project over to the actual Project Backlog, where they will be executed by the engineers. The engineers can then use my stories to map sub-tasks, thus keeping the hierarchy in tact. I can "break" if engineers go right to the backlog and write a task/story ticket. But for the most part those are one-offs that I can catch-up with later. There is a good free add-on for creating multiple sub-tasks call Qucik-Sub tasks that help the engineers quickly enter linked sub-tasks.

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.hascode.plugin.jira-quick-subtasks/server/overview

Answer 3

According to an Atlassian Knowledge Base article on the subject:

While JIRA has been developed primarily as an issue and project tracker out of the box, you can use JIRA for requirements management in conjunction with Confluence.

Among other things, the article discusses issue-level requirements, Confluence Blueprints, and provides a link to a third-party add-on named RMsis.