Advice on requirements / project breakdown

paul bryant_68p5t0

Hello

We are about to start a new project where we will be using Confluence and Jira to support a large mixed (Infrastructure & Software) system development. The organisation is a large traditional waterfall  system engineering business, and this is its first foray into the agile world. But we have been using Jira for some time for issue management.

We are going to use confluence as a wiki  / repository for all of the high level sources of information and then the generated  high level requirements from the information sources.

At that point those requirements would be transferred to Jira to a) derived sub-system requirements and then b)  manage the delivery of the products that meet the derived requirements using scrum.

I require some advice as to which way go for the Jira part. Do we create one project to do both requirements and delivery or do we create two projects one to derive the requirements and the other to deliver the products?

My concerns are if we use a single project how do we separate out requirement work from product work given the limited levels of hierarchy and maintain traceability back to up through the requirement tree..

Whereas if we use two projects  how do I transfer over the derived requirements and also maintain linking back confluence for context. and requirement traceaability

Many Thanks

Tarun Sapra

Hello @paul bryant

You have asked a very broad question and frankly there is no concrete answer, because it depends on how your teams respond to the tools and there might be changes required in the process after getting few feedbacks from the team. Thus, if it's a large scale rollout of the Atlassian stack then it can take easily upto 6 months for things to be stable across all teams in terms of permissions, workflows, automation , reporting etc. 

I have been in a similar situation at a client and here's how we did it. Basically, use confluence for managing requirements and use JIRA for managing the projects. Use a single project in JIRA. Use type hierarchy like Initiative -> Epic -> Story. Make sure your requirements in confluence are mapped to either Initiative (6 months worth of work) or Epics (around a month's worth of work) . This can be done by linking confluence pages to JIRA initiatives and epic as confluence and JIRA can be seamlessly integrated via Application Links.

Make sure in confluence that you have an proper content structure hierarchy which the teams adheres to, like -Parent Page (initiative in jira) -> child pages (epics in JIRA) 

Thus all major requirements and architecture/process flow diagrams can be developed in confluence but at the same time linked with JIRA tickets. Also, in confluence make use of "JIRA macro" filter to fetch statuses of JIRA issues within confluence so that the POs, BAs know within the confluence as to how much the teams have progressed in JIRA.

I hope this gives you somewhat of a start.