JIRA Agile Best Practice for beginners

Question

Hey all,

My team and I are new to JIRA Agile, and I want to ask what are the best practices for the following issues:

1. Should we use story points for user stories and time estimation for the sub tasks?

2. Should we defined our custom issue type or is it best to use the default: user stories and sub-tasks? If we do define an issue types should it be a sub-task or a task level?

3. How can I manage my team capacity?

4. Is it best practice to define a task as front-end/back-end tasks?

5. How can I configure permission levels?

Thank you,

Shani

Julie Vu [Beenicon] · Answer

Hi Shani,

Regarding your question: 3. How can I manage my team capacity?

As my experience, team productivity is not only based on how you manage to build a smooth process on Jira instances, but it's also about how your team members collaborate effectively. I would suggest that you should integrate Jira with other tools from planning, management, communication (at this part, you can connect Jira with your Slack channels, our team have used this Slack integration for Jira and I love it), analytics, reporting, etc.

There are plenty of add-ons on Atlassian marketplace to help you do so. Take the most out of them :)

Good luck!

Eva Kasiak_q7mdx0 · Answer

Hi Shani

all of your questions are great and make sense for the agile framework as such. As per the tutorial above definetelly Atlassian wikis will be helpfull. I will try additionally to support you and answer your questions above.

1. Should we use story points for user stories and time estimation for the sub tasks?

As a CSM I usually get quite simple approach and set up with dev team when we use Agile. We agree that 1 story point - 1 dev hour. this way it is much easier to actually define the level of effort especially when you're not yet hands on with planning poker.

The structure of Agile backlog is following:

Epics/USer Stories/Tasks/Sub - Task - no matter which the team is working on you can always use the same approach for estimates and not mix story points with time/hour estimates

2. Should we defined our custom issue type or is it best to use the default: user stories and sub-tasks? If we do define an issue types should it be a sub-task or a task level?

I always personally make custom set up. Reason for this is that Agile is just a set of methods and frameworks to follow, it is not that stricts as waterfall therefore it is about self organizing teams and flexibility. You can pick up from Agile those aspects which will work the best for you and the team and will support team performance on a sufficien, productive level. 2nd reason is JIRA is fully customizable - there are though some limits in JIRA Cloud, but in JIRA server sky is the limit and you can get lot of customized set up done which makes it very powerfull to support any type of team and any type of process you have internally.

I was doing in depth configuration for digital agencies, software development companies. Each as you can imagine have slightly different type of business and operations therefore it is always good to tailor JIRA to reflect what is the operations in the company and teams. This way the system will support human not vice versa :)

3. How can I manage my team capacity?

Start from Log time feature which is inside of the box in JIRA. You can determine original estimates, then remaining estimates and once the team members will start logging the time via Log Time feature the system will start measuring all automatically. This is I believe good starting point

4. Is it best practice to define a task as front-end/back-end tasks?

Rather think about how you structure your whole project and if you reallt want to start using Epics/Users stories etc. Create Designs Epic or Back End epics. Or other was is to create Epics based on the work stream areas in the projects. It is all up from how big your project is, and how you want to structure it generally speaking

5. How can I configure permission levels?

You can do magic about it :)  again up from which areas of the system and projects and reports you want to allow other users to access. You can create them based on group of users, project, users etc. This one is not easy to answer, because it need to reflect overall hierarchy in the team. Also if you have your end clients working with you and want to invite them to specific JIRA project then this is something you can do and you can limit this client to not see other projects in JIRA etc.

Anton Chemlev - Toolstrek - · Answer

Hi,

I think this tutorial page will be helpful - https://www.atlassian.com/agile