Project-epic-feature-scope, a practical use of Jira question

[Dieter Lauwers]

Hi,

My situation, we have a team of 1 analist, 3 front-end developers and 3 back-end developers.

We are going to release next week the first version of a e-commerce website. The first release will contain the basic features of our e-commercice website. This year was our planning not always so clear, but next year we are planning to work more feature-based and releasing (at least) every month. 

At this moment we have defined 9 features. We are going to break down each feature in concrete and well defined tasks. The workload/duration of each tasks is limited to max. 2 weeks. This way of working we have a rough estimate how long a feature will take to implement. Before we start implementing a task, we are planning to break down this task in smaller tasks.

But now, how can I map the above situation in Jira.

My questions:

• Can I assume that my project un JIRA is equals to the e-commercce website?
• Should I have 1 theme, 2 or 3 themes?
• Should I configure each features as epic or feature?
• Should I configure the break down of each feature is tasks or use case?

I hope that you understand my problem and can give me advice in how I should setup/add the above situation in Jira, 

Note we have a license of Portfolio.

Greetings,

Dieter Lauwers

[Walter Buggenhout]

Nice description of your case! Nevertheless, it will always be difficult to give proper, well founded advise on this with only a small one pager.

Just a few points on your questions:

• Don't ever assume anything . But from what you are saying, having a single project representing the e-commerce website seems to make perfect sense.
• I am guessing your question about themes is related to the fact that you have front-end, back-end and analysis work. If it is strategically important to you to follow up on targets, estimations and actuals from that point of view, you might set up separate themes for that. On the other hand, that means you have to split your issues correspondingly and that doesn't always make sense. If you want to start releasing on a monthly basis, you will want to ship complete features. I guess you won't be shipping an updated database without screens to fill out the new underlying data. Maybe you'll want to use your themes for more strategic, content based aspects of your roadmap. But that's for you to decide of course. You might want to manage your analysis and development using skills in Portfolio, but you have to take into account that that also brings the overhead of specifying all your estimations in a very detailed way as well.
• At first glance, your 9 features could be epics. A further breakdown could be done using stories and subtasks (but consider those just as more or less default names. You could just as well use other issue types to represent the same things).

Hope this helps already. If you are in the process of this, might not be a bad advise to call in some expert consultancy to help you get your process set up right. Always willing to help if needs be.