Issues/Components/Projects, etc... Organization

Question

I'm new to Jira and I come from a waterfall methodology. Currently, we have business folks that submit enhancement requests, a BSA, would write a BRD, and then those requirements would then get sent to a developer.

I'm confused about how to organize requirements into an enhancement request.

Should we have one project for each enhancement?

Should we have one project for each system? (i.e. Salesforce)?

How do we group the requirements so know which requirements go with each enhancement?

We'll have several enhancements associated with Salesforce and I see each project has their own release schedule, so I'm kind of thinking that I would need a way to group each enhancement together

Help me please!

THANKS in advance!

Anna-BigPicture · Answer

HI @Joshua Dumas

Welcome to the Atlassian community!

Thank you, @G subramanyam for outlining handy ways on how to organize the work.

For the sake of completeness, let me add that, indeed, addons like BigPicture/BigGantt may additionally support your work and helps to plan, manage and track the projects.

Depending on the scale of your operations and internal processes, there can several solutions proposed. However, regardless of the scale,  BigPicture provides a solution that can be used to organize enhancement requests and BRDs efficiently.

* Option 1: Use Epic issue types as enhancement requests and Story issue types as BRDs. Link Epics and Stories with an Epic link. Create Components for different systems: Salesforce etc. Then in BigPicture, activate structure builders: Components and Epics. Everything can be kept in one Jira project. See my image as a reference.

* Option 2: Create one Jira project per system (Salesforce, GetResponse). In each project, keep the structure of Epics for Enhancement Requests and Stories for BRDs. In BigPicture, thx to the Box concept, you will be able to create an Enhancement portfolio decomposing to the system that you define.

Then in each system Box, you will be able to create a similar to Option 1 structure of Epics and Stories.

On top of that, BigPicture gives you an option to manage dependencies between the issues, manage sprints, and many more. I will gladly provide a more detailed answer if you share more details regarding expected outcomes and the selected concept of work.

G subramanyam · Answer

Hi @Joshua Dumas welcome to the Atlassian community.

Please be informed, their are multiple options that I see. However, your Jira admin would be able to assist you better, given your organization hierarchy or projects set up.

Option 1: You can create multiple boards for a single project. Eg., Development team will have a Scrum board and QA team have a Kanban board. This gives them to concentrate better on the tasks in hand.

Option 2: Have multiple projects on a single board. e.g., Their are 3 projects running and you would like to see the status of all project issue types in a single board. This gives a quick visibility to management or Scrum master (also if PM) etc.

Option 3: Recently I have been checking market place apps and I see a tool Big-Picture with portfolio level visibility and track. @Anna-BigPicture could you please share details on this query and ideas.

Option 4: You might just go with the Kanban backlog loaded with all the enhancement issue types and Kanban board for a simplified work flow.

Option 5: Jira has labels and components fields to specify the systems and OR brands for easy tracking, reporting, releases.

In order to proceed with the above, the user must be a Jira admin to enable and configure the boards and projects.

Stay safe and stay healthy.

Niranjan · Answer

Hi @Joshua Dumas - I would suggest few options, but you must decide on the approaches.

I would create one project and then create each system as separate components under that project. Each component can have component leads. Then create Epics and add the components to indicate which system are they associated with. You can create multiple stories under each component.

For instance,

Project

Component : Salesforce

Create an Epic : Salesforce_login

Stories linked with Salesforce_login