Project management using JIRA

[paul sharpe]

Hi all, 

We are currently reviewing the development process, in particular how we use confluence and JIRA to organise and plan our work. 

The process i have come up with involves using a sprint per release.

our dev team receives large requests for changes to various systems, so we would want to use an epic per request too Thus, our process would be:

a request would come in, i would create an epic for this request.

Then the request would be analysed, and all documents would be uploaded onto confluence. The confluence page would then be linked to the JIRA epic so the dev team had access to the analysis.

Once the request is green-lit for development, the user stories for the Epic would be created by our solutions architect.

The Epic's stories would then all be placed into the relevant sprint (dependent on which release the epic will be deployed in).

What are your thoughts on the process we have devised? do you have any experience with a similar process which could give cause for concern?

my main concerns are the following:

1. can we just place an epic into a sprint, thus populating all relevant issues into the sprint, or do i have to manually push all issues from an epic into a sprint.#

2. is it possible to place an epic into a sprint, if the epic has no issues in it? (i.e. for if i was to create a sprint for 'awaiting Approval, so the devs had visibility of the requests which were being analysed'

many regards,

paul