Looking for advice getting small agile team setup

[Thomas Mancini]

Trying to figure out the best/easiest way to get up and running with JIRA. We are a small dev team tasked with modernizing an older application into a web application. The team is composed of myself as the director/product owner, a back-end developer, front-end developer, ux/ui designer, and full-stack developer who will be also be sharing some of the product owner/requirements gathering roles with me.

In terms of lifecycle we envision the following: Feature Request Identified > User Stories fleshed out for feature > UX/UI Design kick-off to review the stories with the designer > UX/UI Design > Design Accepted > Development > Code Review > Deploy to staging > QA/QC > QA/QC Accepted > Deploy to production.

I am trying to figure out the best way between JIRA Epics, Stories, Tasks, Sub-Tasks, Statuses, Components, etc. to make it clear what everyone should be working on, what everyone is working on, along with being able to give everyone the proper credit for work they’ve done during monthly and quarterly business reviews. I have been wrestling with this for a while and hoping to get some insight/advice/suggestions on the best way to get JIRA setup so that it’s a good tool and provides nice insight without getting in the way of everyone getting their jobs done. I know we aren’t doing things differently than most and our team is not very large, but getting up and running with JIRA has been one of my biggest issues so far.

TIA

[Marty]

Hi Thomas,

to get started I would recommend trying to use fewer constructs.

For example you may not really need Stories, Sub-Tasks, Components and Epics to begin with.  You could just use Tasks.

Visualise a board with columns where each column is mapped to a Status.

When you want to add horizontal swim-lanes to the board you could consider adding Epics.

Then you can get started with moving tasks across the board.

Although it's good to have boards that do not have too many columns, so perhaps use 2 boards, one for design and one for development / qa / deployment.

Another thing that I would recommend is that you consider the ways that your team works together.  There are some team practices that we use to really help the team work well together, to break down barriers and keep communication and trust flowing.

One is Design Sparring where designers involve developers and QA earlier in the process so the whole team can understand the purpose behind a feature and the design problems and have some input: https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook/plays/sparring

For a way to do a health checkup on the team itself we use the Team Health Monitor: https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook/health-monitor

To think more about Agile ways of working I can recommend: https://www.atlassian.com/agile

I hope that helps!