strategy for relationship between Confluence Spaces and Jira epics and projects?

[John Egan]

I have a strategy question, and I'm very interested to hear how others address this. We have an ecommerce website, and over the last 2 years, our team has been using Jira and Confluence, learning as we go. 

We're trying to improve our documentation and planning to better support an offshore development team. 100% of our time is devoted to this website, so we have a single Jira project for working on the website. We create epics for all initiatives on this website; things like redesigning our checkout process, or bulding a new product detail page, things like that.

The epic and story process works well in Jira, but I'm struggling to match this up in Confluence. we have spaces created for teams, and some for side projects, but we're trying to use a single space to capture the business requirements and wire frame files. Right now, we're using a single requirements document that matches up to an epic, but this seems a bit awkward. Is that the best way? should we start in Conflunce, and then create the epic and stories?

I'm wondering how others use these two tools together. I'm also curious how others use Confluence to manage documentation after the epic has completed, and how you gather initial research (vendor docs, customer inverviews, business requirments from marketing, things like that).

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[Hermance NDounga]

I'm not exactly sure of why for this particular JIRA project, you don't have one Confluence space? However, to me, it seems totally ok to gather all the info of a JIRA project into one unique Confluence page, at least you same time by not browsing all the space to find infos :p 

I will share with you all the doc that I know on integrating Confluence and JIRA : 

- this is the corporate doc : JIRA - Confluence / integration features

- testimonials of customers using jira + confluence (this is not really technical but it could give you ideas)  written testimonials + Youtube videos

- Blog post made by Atlassian

- Blogpost made by Valiantys (partners of Atlassian)

- other blogpost

[John Egan]

Thanks! I will read through the links you provided. There looks to be some helpful information we can use to develop a better workflow :)

[Phil Torrent]

Hi John

What we do is use the Product Requirements blue print in confluence to capture high level user stories, business goals, process flows and UX design.

You can then highlight the text in the Product Requirements page and a little icon pops up that lets you generate user stories in your Jira project. We also record the epics on the Product Requirements page too that groups all the user stories.

That allows us to see for a particular feature or function that status. e.g. Create a Product Requirements page for "Registration", on the page you will be able to see all the user stories and their status updates back from Jira. Jira will hold all of the details for the dev team. There is an overall status for a Product Requirement aswell once you have completed the feature.

[Manjunatha K R]

Confluence and Jira integration feature helps us to get the requirements v/s development (story) progress statuses along with writing requirement documents, reviewing, publishing/baselining, etc features and we can create strories/EPICs from the confluence page/document by highlighting the requirements text easily.

[Phil Parkin]

We use Confluence for team collaboration on all requirements gathering & refinement. using a 'master' Confluence document (which is created from a custom document template) for each project.

Only when we know exactly what is required do we create linked JIRA items to manage the work to be performed during the implementation phase.

[Jonathon_Prosper]

Hi there,

I split the domains or project, admin and operations in my space design.

In your instance (at a guess)

- Create "admin - <team>" spaces for each team. They can use this to create/maintain knowledge that is not specific to a project. Information such as team structure, purpose, goal, general info.

- Create "project - <product>" for each product. On the main landing page provide a basic oversight on all the major development items happenning in the products. Perhaps embed a jira macro with the epics and their descriptions and show a basic roamdap overview on the delivery timeframes for each. Then, create one page per major Epic of the project. In that page and under that page write up all your requirements pages, schreen mockups, business processes etc. Any information that helps the team "build the product" goes there. Dev teams would probably be looking at this content the most.

Finally

Create "Operations - <product>". This space is dedicated to maintaining knowledge for the staff tasked with supporting the product post-release. This could include user documentation, common troubleshooting, release processes etc.

This kind of sructure at a high level has worked for me in the past. I hope it may be helpful.

JP