4 Ways Adding Forms to Issues Amps Up the Power of Jira
Want to have your cake and eat it too? Imagine having all of the detailed information you need on a Jira issue without having to create custom fields. Embedding a form (or several forms) in a Jira issue, is a great solution. It makes it easy to gather information on an issue - the precise, detailed data that’s required for a particular process. The information can be structured, formatted and validated to meet your teams’ needs.
Forms can be created for any possible use case and are an excellent strategy for bringing non-tech teams into Jira. Here are a few broad ways that forms can make Jira even more effective.
Background Information
Forms can be used to preserve and display the thinking behind the decision to carry out a particular project. This is useful for Project Initiation Documents, use cases, KPIs and business justifications. Simply put, it allows you to keep the answer to the question, “Why are we doing this?” in front of the team members who are working on a project. This serves to keep everyone motivated and limit scope creep.
Specifications
Creating a new product? There are a lot of features that need to be specified. Forms let you break out all of that information into individual fields so it can be easily inputted, viewed and addressed. There’s no risk of missing important details that are lumped together in the description field.
Request Management
Forms are the right way to get the required information for processing service requests. If customers are not prompted with specific questions, they may forget to include important details when creating a request. This means that the agent will need to go back and ask for the information. The customer gets frustrated by the delay and work in progress piles up in the service queue. Things would have been better for everyone if all of the information had been provided in the first place. In fact, deploying well-designed request form on the JSD customer portal can be the key to providing one-touch service.
Checklists
Forms can also be used to create that mother of all tracking tools – the checklist. Including a checklist on an issue means you can standardize procedures and limit the use of subtasks. Whether the checklist represents acceptance criteria, a definition of done, or an ongoing to do list – you can include as many items as needed and organize them into logical sections for easy navigation. Multiple checklists can be added to a single issue and you can include comment fields for times when checklist items need a little more explanation.
Fields that are added to forms are fields that don’t need to be added to the Jira issues themselves. You only need to create custom fields for items that you'll query or report on. Thus, forms are a way to have more information with less admin. While I am associated with the makers of ProForma, you can find several forms apps in the Atlassian Marketplace.
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Jennifer Choban
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