How to track unknown effort in JIRA

[DIPTANIL SENGUPTA]

For one of my team members who is responsible for technical documentation, always needs to reach out to various technical teams to gather relevant information. Unless the technical discussion is done and complexity is understood she cannot provide any estimate. On the other hand the PO wishes to have the task in the JIRA board and thus results a task spillover. 

How to tackle this ? Any similar experience shared will be appreciated

Rgds

Neel

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

This is not really a question about Jira, it's more about information in general.

Given any tracking tool, you have to put information into it if you want to get, infer or calculate from it.   A computer simply cannot act on information it does not have (humans can't either, but we do dumb things like guessing, opining or asking other ill-informed or poor sources, instead of getting the actual information we should be considering)

You have a problem here where your PO wants data that you simply do not have (until the tech discussion is done).  It's pointless discussing Jira or any other tracking system here, you need to make your PO understand that the data does not exist yet, and then, ideally, come up with a method of getting the technical discussions done before the PO is going to ask, or representing the unknown so that they understand it (a common trick there is to pick the highest estimate you usually work with, like 100 story points or a length of time in months or covering at least three sprints), so that at least the PO understands that it could take a while.

[DIPTANIL SENGUPTA]

Hello Nic,

Thanks a lot for the detailed explanation, highly appreciated ! The project has just started entering into the agile world and thus it's behaving like "taking the requirements" and dumping them into PB  and then SB etc. 

Thanks again, 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I think it's better to log everything ("taking the requirements") and dump them in the issue tracker, just so everyone can see all the things that might need doing.  Worst case is that the PO says "nope" to a big pile of it, and you close them, un-done, with something that says "won't do this because ..."

Moving to "agile" doesn't have to be a sudden massive change.  I usually start by getting the "product owner" role clear and making sure the PO is empowered - they should see everything that might need doing, but have the authority to prioritise the list.  Not dictate what is next, just put the list in the order your organisation would like it done.  Then get them to trust the development team to do the right thing!  And move the developers to be more "agile"