Hi All,
I'm a software developer. As such, I've worked on many projects that use Jira and I think of it as an awesome tool for agile teams. Are you with me on that? If you are, I would really appreciate your feedback but first let me tell you about a recent experience I had.
A few months ago I joined a team which had probably the worst backlog I've ever seen. It just didn't make any sense. Why?, because user stories had generic titles like "User Login", no description whatsoever and forget about prioritization, estimation or any other stuff.
I tried my best to explain how to write user stories (based on experience; I don't consider myself an expert on the matter), the importance of backlog grooming sessions, the importance of defining a proper ticket workflow (what's your definition of DONE?!) and other practices I consider help the whole team understand what they are building and gives management good visibility of the project.
Through meetings and with examples and presentations I tried to enforce some rules e.g.
- If the issue/ticket is of type story, write it following the "persona + need + purpose" template.
- Give your story an Acceptance Criteria.
- If the ticket is a Bug report, add a bullet list of steps to reproduce.
- Don't leave the tickets "In Progress" if you are not working on them (move them to pause)
- Etc...
It was useless. I was barking at the wrong tree. Everyone just kept writing and using Jira the way they wanted. I finally quit the project because there were too many broken windows and technical debt.
After that frustrating experience I started thinking, Can we enforce rules automatically in Jira? When writing code I almost always use a linter or other static code analysis tools that help me identify when I'm not following coding conventions or guidelines, stylistic errors or potential bugs.
I looked at the Marketplace for a tool that would help me enforce at least a very basic set of rules e.g. sintaxis, format and the presence of some content on a ticket. I couldn't find anything useful. There's one story quality tool that's for Jira Server. The other that's compatible with Jira Cloud just wouldn't install.
A good friend of mine pointed me to an interesting tool, but it's only a prototype (the theoretical background is what makes it really interesting!). I don't want to export a CSV, startup a Python backend and make a request to get an evaluation of my stories.
So, that's how I decided to start coding a Jira Cloud Application that would validate my stories. It's a work in progress. Here it is: https://github.com/jmigueprieto/ticket-linter. I'm thinking about putting it in the Marketplace but first I want to get some feedback from the community. Specifically, I'm curious about the following:
- Which team members are responsible for writing stories in your teams?
- Do you use any automated user story quality tool? (Maybe I just didn't google enough and there's an awesome tool for Jira out there)
- What type of rules do you enforce when writing a User Story?
- Do you enforce any other rules on other type of tickets?
- When using Jira, do you write your story in the Summary/title or the Description?
Thank you!
