Jira and issue visibility (also process help)

[David]

I'm looking for help and suggestions about how to modify our Jira instance to help with visibility, both for those of us working on issues as well as stakeholders who are not in Jira very much, but don't see all the work that is being done.

We have 1 primary workflow for our bugs and enhancements. We utilize a lot of boards to create visibility into the following:

• Dev Queue - issues ready for dev to work
• Ready for code review - dev complete, waiting for review
• Ready to Build - Passed code review and waiting for QA
• Patch Candidates - bugs and minor changes going in to our weekly releases (not our major releases)
• QA - issues ready for testing or in testing

Our primary issue is we have so many tickets in flux at any given time. We try to stick to priorities, but these are constantly changing. Due to limited number of qa and dev resources, we find ourselves bogged down in larger projects. These make it hard to keep the smaller/quicker issues from moving through. 

We also find ourselves in scenarios where we do dev work, then the ticket sits and waits, then it makes it into QA for testing, then we send it back to dev for defects. By this time, the developer has already started other work. So they either have to delay working on the defects, or put the other ticket down. By the time they fix the defects, the QA resource or site may already be used for another issue so now it sits and waits. We find our devs and QAs constantly bouncing between too many tickets. 

We're struggling to figure out how to be efficient with out time. When a developer finishes an issue, they move to the next and then next. So they will be working through their queue while also going back to previous tickets that have now made their way into QA. 

Our QA team has a similar issue. They start testing, send a ticket back and pick up the next ticket. They too are bouncing between tickets ready to test and tickets they were previously testing and have since come back from dev.

I know we have process issues and any suggestions are appreciated. I'm also looking for anything else we can do in Jira to help provide visibility into the chaos above to help identify it and make it more visible. We haven't found a good way to create visibility into the big picture. The filters, boards, dashboards we have feel too specific (zoomed in). It feels like we have to jump between too many views to piece the picture together.

One additional note. We also use a Product Discovery project to funnel ideas with the hope of prioritizing them. We have around 100 issues that are currently code complete that we are trying to get through QA and released, but we are also constantly adding new tickets into the mix as "the new priorities". 

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @David,

You have a lot going on, as it seems from your post. It will be hard (if not impossible) to get that all resolved through simple Q&A here, but I do have a couple of suggestions and feedback:

• You seem to struggle with too much going on at the same time and also keeping that situation alive. There is a strong and well known saying: "stop starting, start finishing". In the scenario you describe, that comes down to trying to reduce the number of new items you are pulling into your flow while they are just piling up at the other end; you need to make sure you're feeding your team an amount of work they can handle. If you don't, people are starting to feel as they can never complete something, you don't offer any predictability to your stakeholders/customers, pressure goes up as a result and you end up in an never-ending downwards spiral.
• You mention some clear bottlenecks into your system at the handovers between dev and QA (in both directions). See if you can bring your teams closer together to do an initial validation as soon as dev completes before they start working on something else. If any obvious problems are tackled then and there, you might be able to reduce the time, effort and number of quality issues that come back at a later time, increasing flow and quality.
• That previous step is something you could try to build as a common practice across your entire flow: work together, community, bring people together across functions to create clarity and feedback as soon as possible.
• Regarding the design of your tools and many views you mention: try to create a single view of a work for a single team. If a team needs to work on something (regardless if it's on one or many projects), make sure they have a single board to find their work.
• You don't mention if you're using scrum (sprints) or kanban. It might help to start runnning sprints for some time, as that would help you get a sense of control as to what your team(s) can accomplish over a fixed period of (by the book) 2 weeks. That may be an interesting learning path (if you are not already doing this).

Additionally:

• I can warmly recommend the Agile Group here on Community where you can participate in process discussions and raise practice related questions.
• Consider working with a solutions partner to help you get your process / tools / people mix aligned better. Working for one myself, I can testify from the field that this can bring amazing results.

All the best on your journey towards continuous improvement!

Hope this helps!