How do we collaborate with external stakeholders to define requirements and user stories?

[Pieter van Aarde]

I'm a new Atlassian user, and we're collaborating with external customers to define requirements and user stories. Ideally, we'd like to capture and define these in as much detail as possible within Confluence where we can control the access for external collaborators.

Once approved, we'd then push it over to Jira for the development team to build. We don't want to open Jira up to any external customers for collaboration on the user stories.

From what we've found so far, it looks like the Product Requirements Template is the best option although the ability to break them down into user stories appear limited since it doesn't allow for the full user story to be captured and defined in Confluence.

Any guidance or recommendations for how best to approach this?

[Kristian Klima · Accepted solution]

Hi @Pieter van Aarde and Welcome to the Community.

Access:

With Confluence, you can use the Guest features which allows you to give access to external users (at no additional cost as they do not count towards your User count).

A guest can access just one single space, this allows you to create multiple spaces on the one space per customer basis, and control access without feat that a Guest from Company A will see whatever you're cooking with Company B.

How to:

You aim for Confluence to do, in part, the job that Jira was designed for. But you can use Confluence creatively to mimic that - by using the Template that suits you best.

For example. In a space, a Parent Page will define your US on what, in Jira, would an Epic.

Then, the child pages of that Epic Parent Page (pun intended :) ) would be the breakdowns with their definitions. 

You can then mimic the structure in Jira and include the Confluence pages in individual tickets. This will give you the option to edit the pages directly from Jira - customers will have access to the Confluence content and collaborate from there, you will retain the control over you Jira environment while being able to refine the content from there.

Again, this is an example that I hope might inspire you to design the solution that fits you.