Guide to JIRA Workflow: Check Best Practices

JIRA is a tool used by software teams to track and organize their projects, this tool is extremely flexible and can be customized according to the team's unique requirements. With the help of JIRA, teams, despite their level of experience and expertise, can boost their visibility when launching new products and services.

Alongside enabling seamless project management, JIRA can facilitate bug-tracking. The best practices of JIRA help in efficient problem-solving and enable efficient risk management. JIRA has robust solutions that are beneficial for all departments. Going for JIRA certification training will help you understand the fundamentals of JIRA.

There are different teams like HR, legal, marketing, operations, and finance, all of which count on JIRA for effective team management and smooth execution of the project. This article has been curated to give you a thorough understanding of how JIRA works and some of the best practices in JIRA.

How to Use JIRA Effectively?

JIRA being a platform rich in features, highly adaptable, can help different types of teams manage their work. The tool comes with a number of toolkits and features that can enable project managers, software developers, and other professionals to manage projects, tasks, and processes seamlessly. JIRA can also be teamed up with a myriad of other tools such as Bitbucket, Confluence, Github, Slask, etc., all of which will help you expedite your development process.

However, it might be a complex task to streamline all the approaches. The next section will deal with some of the best practices in JIRA. Some of the ways you can use the set of tools offered by JIRA effectively are discussed in the next section.

Expert Tips to Boost your Productivity in JIRA

Here are some JIRA best practices that you can follow to enhance your productivity while working in JIRA: 

• Get Notified of the Tasks that You Need to Perform: JIRA allows the provision to use a filter subscription which will inform you of the tasks that you need to perform. Create a JIRA issue for a future date, set a “due date”, and assign it to yourself. After you save the new filter, create a filter subscription so you can receive an email when the due date is near.
• Eliminate the Hassle of Multiple Clicks: With the help of the “Search Engines” browser feature, users can go straight to the projects, pages, and issues of JIRA. This will save the effort of having to click multiple times in order to finally reach a destination and will automatically boost your productivity in JIRA.
• Incorporate the Use of Keyboard Shortcuts: This is another way in which you can boost your productivity. Users will have to learn the use of a touchpad and mouse and make it easier to perform common tasks.
• Bookmarks Bar: Go to the page you visit the most and would like to bookmark. Open Chrome and move to the “Bookmarks” section and then click on “Bookmark this Page.” Name the bookmark, and your page will be ready to be added to the bookmark bar.

Best Practices When Using JIRA

Although one might be knowledgeable about using JIRA workflows, it might be difficult to make the most out of them unless you are aware of the best practices of JIRA. For maximum efficiency, you will require some JIRA best practices for project management that you can incorporate while using JIRA. Some of them are as mentioned below:

JIRA Insurance Should be Kept Clean and Tidy

The admins who deal in large instances often find it difficult to organize everything in order. The best practices JIRA guidelines state that for the JIRA instances to appear organized, it is important to maintain consistency and cleanliness of the issues.

Work on issues like eliminating typos and errors, removing unwanted custom fields, filling all the essential fields, updating dates, and various such tasks. 

Automation Tools Can Help to Save Time

Admins might consider adding automation tools to their add-ons suite, which will help them to save time and increase the functionality of JIRA. You can simply automate the tasks that are repetitive, calculations, reports, and processes that are prone to error. ScriptRunner is an add-on that can be used with JIRA, which can help to customize the workflows, interface, etc., into the defaults of JIRA.

Involve the Stakeholders

This is one of JIRA workflow best practices that prove to be extremely beneficial. One of the mistakes admins make is not involving the stakeholders when creating the workflows. While building a workflow, it is important to enable stakeholder participation or at least discuss the workflow creation process in depth with the party which will be using it in the future, a.k.a clients. 

Therefore, it is ideally suggested to involve a stakeholder from the different roles, such as the project manager, product designer, software engineer, quality assurance engineer, content designer, etc., in the team. Their consent plays a key role, as their satisfaction will help you speed up the process.

Reduce the Complexities

The more transitions and statuses you add, the more complex the task will be for the team to carry out. For better and faster execution of the task, it is important to keep the process lean. Consult with your team, including the stakeholders, and assess their efficiency.

Based on that, you should only include the transitions and statuses you find most important. This will help to streamline the process and keep confusion at bay.

Proper Naming Scheme for Items

JIRA has multiple screens, schemes, and workflows. Working with all of them might become chaotic at times. To get rid of this problem, one can come up with naming rules, which will simplify the process. This will help you organize everything in order and enable the ease of navigating through the items.

Creating Requirements on JIRA

Now that we have dealt with the best practices of JIRA, we can now move towards the other aspects of the software, like, creating a requirement. If you are willing to develop a "Requirement" on JIRA, these are the steps that you need to follow:

Step 1: If you click on the “Create” option on JIRA, you will see a window allowing users to create issues. 

Step 2: The business requirements are first added as “Epics.” Requirements can also be added as “User Stories” or “Features.” One can again make changes to requirements in the form of ideas, improvements, incidents, or bugs.

Step 3: The epics you add will be visible toward the left of the screen. Users can expand the topics to see the issues added as tasks, stories, etc. The user can also select the option that reads “Create Issue in Epic” to create a story under any given epic.

Step 4: While adding the issues, one can add a great deal of information about a given issue. The issues need to have details like the priority, the due date, detail about the person to whom the issue has been assigned, the individual who has created the issue, the environment in which the issue can be seen or where it needs to be fixed, the criteria under which the issue will be considered fixed, and so on.

Users can also tag an issue to a sprint or keep it aside for the future. This helps to sort the issues and search for them in the future.

Step 5: You can also add tasks and subtasks under the JIRA user story workflow or issues you create in JIRA. For this, you will have to select the option that reads “Create.”

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JIRA Workflow Examples

JIRA projects have issues that the team can view and work on. The issues also transition through the different stages ranging from creation to completion. The path that is followed by the issues is known as a workflow. Each of these workflows consists of a set of transitions and statuses that the issues follow during their lifecycle. Some JIRA workflow examples are as follows: 

Sequential Workflow

This kind of workflow is usually chart-based, and the work progresses from one step to another. Every step counts on the completion of activities in the initial step. This can be equated with a connect-the-dots system, in which one has to follow the numbers in proper sequence. The activities cannot go back and forth.

State Machine Workflow

In this kind of workflow, the progress takes from one state to another. It is slightly more complicated than the sequential workflow. Unlike the sequential workflow, where the works follow a proper sequence, the activities in state machine workflow may or may not follow a proper sequence. They might come back and forth as and when needed. One has to constantly keep putting the important pieces in the correct order so that the project can be completed.

Rules-driven Workflow

This kind of workflow is based on the sequential workflow and has rules that must be abided by. This kind of workflow is ideally suited for projects with clear goals, but the specifications levels might vary.

Conclusion

Hope this gives you a clear idea about the functioning of JIRA software. You must be aware by now that the JIRA software is flexible and can be configured in a way as to fit almost any kind of project. Based on their requirement, teams can either choose or customize their own workflow. 

JIRA issues also referred to as tasks, track the workpieces that have to pass through the different steps of the workflow to attain completion. The KnowledgeHut JIRA certification training will equip you with the knowledge and skills about the best practices of JIRA and everything else that you might require to excel in this field.