Requirements Workflow in JIRA

Question

We have a requirements document in Confluence that is in the early stages.  Our users are looking for a good way to discuss proposed requirements.  Using comments on the Confluence page isn't ideal because there's no link from the text down to the comment.  We thought there might be a good way to use JIRA to help with this stage of development, but I'm having trouble coming up with a best practice for how to do that.  There doesn't seem to be a requirements workflow available on the marketplace.  I did stumble across something from zagile, but we use OnDemand, so that won't work for us.  I'm looking for suggestions on what a workflow might look like for requirements discussion (i.e., what issue types, statusus, and transitions are good to have).  Thanks!

Jessica_Moszkowicz · Answer

I'm relatively new to the company, but I think in the past they've used a wiki page to document requirements, but that page was pretty much the result of several group discussions, so there wasn't a lot of documentation along the way to get to those requirements.

We ended up creating a table in our Confluence page that has a "notes" column.  To keep discussion on a particular requirement from taking over the entire page, we hide the discussion in an expand macro that contains a bulleted list.  Users can comment there, using @mentions to say who the comment came from.  A user can "reply" to that comment by putting in a sub-bullet, or he or she can add a new comment on the same level as the first one.  Our users responded to this pretty well, though it's a bit clunky.

Dave · Answer

Hi Jessica,

Do you have an internal workflow that you currently use for these discussions?  Knowing the details of the use case would help suggest ideas for creating that workflow within JIRA.

Cheers,

-dave