Hands-On Agile Software Development with JIRA

Design and manage software projects using the Agile methodology

David Harned

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781789532135
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781789539622
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Entreprise Applications
• Index: Computer Science

Plan, track, and release great software

Key Features

• Learn to create reports and dashboard for effective project management
• Implement your development strategy in JIRA.
• Practices to help you manage the issues in the development team

Book Description

As teams scale in size, project management can get very complicated. One of the best tools to deal with this kind of problem is JIRA.

This book will start by organizing your project requirements and the principles of Agile development to get you started. You will then be introduced to set up a JIRA account and the JIRA ecosystem to help you implement a dashboard for your team's work and issues. You will learn how to manage any issues and bugs that might emerge in the development stage. Going ahead, the book will help you build reports and use them to plan the releases based on the study of the reports. Towards the end, you will come across working with the gathered data and create a dashboard that helps you track the project's development.

What you will learn

• Create your first project (and manage existing projects) in JIRA
• Manage your board view and backlogs in JIRA
• Run a Scrum Sprint project in JIRA
• Create reports (including topic-based reports)
• Forecast using versions
• Search for issues with JIRA Query Language (JQL)
• Execute bulk changes to issues
• Create custom filters, dashboards, and widgets
• Create epics, stories, bugs, and tasks

Who this book is for

This book is for administrators who wants to apply the Agile approach to managing the issues, bugs, and releases in their software development projects using JIRA.

Managing Work Items

In the previous chapter, we learned about what JIRA is, how to get started with it, and how to create a project in JIRA. In this chapter, we're going to learn about managing all of the work items that we have.

In this chapter, we'll be learning about epics, stories, bugs, and tasks; what each of these things are; and how we will use and create them in an agile project. Then, we're going to learn about issue type attributes. We're going to talk about adding and removing them, and making them fit the type of work that we're doing in JIRA. Then, we're going to learn about managing the items in our backlog, before learning about our board (those of us that do scrum are going to feel very comfortable with the board) and how to configure it.

In this chapter, we will learn about the following topics:

• Introducing epics, stories, bugs, and tasks
• Issue type attributes and adding and removing them
• Managing items in the backlog
• Creating and configuring our board

Introducing epics, stories, bugs, and tasks

Epics, as you might imagine, are large stories. We want them to be able to be completed, so it's important that they have a distinct start and end, just like any story. We like to think of epics as something that would span multiple sprints, versus a story, which could be completed within a sprint. Epics are not groupings of work items, which is a common mistake that people make when organizing their work in the JIRA interface. We'll take a look at how to use components and labels to do this, instead of epics. Epics will contain stories, bugs, and tasks.

Stories are smaller than epics. Stories, bugs, and tasks are all on the same level hierarchically; they could all be prioritized against one another within our backlog to include in a sprint. Stories are also known as user stories, and they're called that because they should focus on delivering value to our users. We need to make sure that we're continuing to think about the people that we're building for. That's why they call them user stories, or stories for short.

Bugs are defects, and they occur when there's a problem. In JIRA, bugs are something that we prioritize against a new feature. We should consider the question, do we want to take the time in this sprint to fix something, or do we want to create something new? We should be prioritizing those two things and pitting them against one another as we determine which provides the most value.

A subtask is also something we'll also take a look at. If we have multiple people working on a story or a bug and we want to assign it a more granular level of detail, we can use a subtask to do this.

Creating epics, stories, bugs, and tasks

To learn about epics, let's go to our projects. We created our First Project and Second Project in the previous chapter.

The following are the necessary steps to create an epic in a project:

1. Click on the First Project that we created in our JIRA account.
2. Within our project, we can see that we have the Backlog view. In this view, we have three stories. We can see on the left-hand side of the following panel that we have versions and we have epics. Click on EPICS:

Click to expand the Epics in the Backlog view

3. In the previous screenshot, we can see that we don't have any epics. We'll create an epic and we'll call this epic, My Test Epic. In the summary, we can insert information regarding what the epic is about. Let's go ahead and create it. We need a summary, which we'll call This is a summary. We now have a test epic:

Creating an Epic

Let's take a look at this epic in this screenshot. It has a JIRA ID of FP-4; the Key is FP and the 4 is sequential, so this is the fourth item we have created:

JIRA items are numbered sequentially

In the sub-menu for the epic, we can select the color that we want to use for it, and can edit the name, the epic's details, and mark it as done:

Epics display customization

More importantly, underneath the epic, we can see how many issues or stories, bugs, or tasks are contained within this epic. We can also see how many are completed, unestimated, and how many are estimated. At the bottom, we can see a visual status bar.

We will create our backlog items and then drag those on top of our epic—that's how we assign them to the epic. This epic is a story—it's a big story, but it's something that can be started and finished. Your instincts might tell you to group your stories this way with dragging and dropping, but it's important that this is not just a grouping, as that's not the intent of an epic.

If we want to group items in JIRA, we must do something slightly different. For this, what we can do is use components:

1. Select Components from the options on the left-hand side.
2. We'll create one component because we don't have one. Let's call this My Test Component. We will use the same value in the description. We can select a Component lead and also a Default assignee, who will basically be the same person that is assigned to the project by default:

Creating a component

We can use the component that we've created to group items together.

Let's have a look at how to create a story.

We can see that we have three stories. We'll go ahead and create a new one. We'll call this The newest story.

We can see when we're creating the stories, that we have the options to create a story, a task, or a bug, and that they're all ranked the same hierarchically within JIRA:

A story generally represents a piece of new functionality, a task is just something that needs to be done, and a bug is something that's broken that needs to be fixed.

Issue type selection when creating an item

We'll create The newest story, create The new...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright and Credits
• Dedication
• Packt Upsell
• Contributor
• Preface
• Getting Started with Creating Projects
• Managing Work Items
• Running Your Project in JIRA
• Working with Reports
• Issue Searching and Filtering
• Dashboards and Widgets
• Other Books You May Enjoy