Please help me with a proper way to use jira

Question

Hello,

First of all, sorry, if this comes off as a stupid question. But i'm kinda lost.

So we're a pretty typical software development + implementation project company.

Most of our work items, or stories (i'm sorry but i'm not fully up to the whole epic-story-task-subtask hierarchy, how should that be used?) involves two people - a consultant which is aware of customer requirements, does the functional design and then the testing, and a developer, which does the technical design + coding.

Up till now, we had a pretty complex workflow involving many status changes from billable yes/no, billing accepted yes/no, open, in progress, in development, testing, reopened, dev done, ready to deploy, deployed, billed, closed. Something like that.

And this worked really fine - when a consultant would finish his phase of task, he'd just press a button, enter time spent, enter a comment, change the assignee to a dev, and so on.

Was easy to use and totally understandable.

Then came the planning.

So we wanted to know the remaining workload of everyone. The velocity per person, if I can say that. Compare, measure and plan.

And shit hit the fan.

Since we only have original estimate/remaining estimate once per task, this doesn't work anymore. This gets counted for whoever is the Assignee of the ask.

Fair enough, we thought. Let's use sub-tasks for the development.

And this is where it got terribly un-userfriendly.

Because the statuses can't be linked, whenever a consultant would finish his work, he would have to change the status of dev sub-task to indicate that it's ready to be done. When a dev would finish, he'd have to complete his sub-task, and change status on the main task, to indicate that it can be tested. If there's a problem, and the dev needs to repeat it, the cycle repeats. Not to mention the scattered comments between task and sub-task.

And while this does in fact help us to know the workload and personal input to everything, everyone hates it. I hate it too.

So how does everyone do it? What is the proper way, which is both user friendly and helps to plan and analyse?

Algirdas Kepežinskas · Answer

Thanks everyone for the answers. Since I'm getting somewhat generic answers, I assume I wasn't specific enough with my question.

I'm ready to detail the use case as much as needed, provided anyone wants to help me with the most practical/most often used way of solving it.

Here's my next line of thoughts:

I assume, that we do need to have separate tasks/sub-tasks for consultants and developers, since it's a requirement for planning and measurement to have estimates, remaining estimates and time spent per person.

Since I don't see how to get around without this assumption, this leaves me with one very specific question:

What is the most efficient, easy, and user friendly way to link those tasks/sub-tasks. And by link, I mean, to be able to setup a workflow which involves changing statuses between the linked tasks/sub-tasks, when one of them changes status. So that, if, for example, development task/sub-task is Done, the testing task/sub-task changes to status Ready for Testing. If Ready-for-Testing becomes Reopened, development task also changes to Reopened.

We're ready to buy/use a plugin for that, but since we have many different work processes in the company (projects, product development, support), this has to be quite flexible to setup and change.

a) I think this is not possible with stock Jira. Am I correct?

b) What extension would be most ready to do this?

c) How do other companies use Jira, because this use-case seems pretty standard for any development company?

Thanks!

Anton_Ermolaev · Answer

Hey.
Maybe solve each individual part in individual Task help you. When you close a task, you should have two transitions: 1) ready, close 2) ready, pass to the next one. And with #2, you create a linked task - it can be done either manually (not interesting) or automatically, for example with this plugin (we use it).

In this case, the task of each participant will be separate, you will be able to track it, and participants will minimize manual work.

Jack Brickey · Answer

Hi @Algirdas Kepežinskas , it is difficult to advise you based upon your post TBH. I would really need to better understand your workflow and process to feel comfortable providing a reasonable opinion. On the surface it feels like maybe your workflow is too complex and maybe using Issuetypes to break your workflow into more manageable pieces of work would be good. Example, maybe planning, documentation, development, etc. Just a guess though. That aside, regarding the issue of the user having to update sub-task and parent you could consider automation.