I am by nature or now-a-days habit a planner and organizer and I love project management tools. Our Co has used Jira for years with varying degrees of success. I’m pleased to say that over the last six months we’ve been using Jira’s basic board design pretty successfully, but I know there’s way more than can be done.
Epics, other than for their grouping feature, are largely pointless in our current setup as are other features other than the basic issues.
We found a nice BDD testing plugin about three months ago, which has been working pretty well. And, once I decided to get the team to fully embrace using the acceptance criteria for requirements has been very useful. I’m no longer doing duplicate work.
Now that we’re moving to the publishing realm, I decided to take another look at the design of Jira. This time, it occurred to me that instead of putting everything into one project, I should set up different projects according to the feature set. Our KM will be one project, publishing another with account management and security also going into their own project areas.
Once setup, I’m then changing the filter for the main dev area to include all of these projects so we have one board. But now I can build out the story maps and issues in a more narrow area.
So far, I think it’s working pretty well.