Simple Tutorial, Processes Teaching Devs How to Manage JIRA Tasks
There are a variety of free and freemium tools you can use to make this happen
One thing that has been equally annoying for me as well as developers over the years I’ve worked with is daily maintenance for the JIRA tasks. What I’ve learned is that if you have to tell your team on a daily basis to update the status of their tasks, then something is not connecting.
I’ve found that the issue often lies with the initial planning of the tasks. Although it’s second nature for you when creating and adding tasks for an upcoming sprint, many of the developers, even if they’re following along and asking insightful questions in the moment, struggle to keep up with updating their tasks.
Years later, I have figured out a few solutions that would largely eliminate this issue.
Break Down the Tasks Into the Smallest Units
Creating very small tasks (whenever you can) ensures tickets are easy for the developer to close out, because there is no need to keep it open.
One of the easiest ways to do this is to use either the JIRA test case management tool, or use a plug-in such as Xray. If you can avoid it, please don’t use a tool that cannot be integrated with JIRA (this will be saved for another post). If you cannot associate your test cases with JIRA, at least put a link to the task case with a brief description.
How does this help?
You are basically ensuring that the task is based on the testing outcome, so it’s a focused task. Or, you will need to create a series of tasks dependent on this one test case. Either way, it helps with overall task management.
Create a Short “How-To” Video
I’ve been playing around with tools such as Loom, Vidyard or even Vimeo (this last one doesn’t have the best UI, but lets you record for longer under a free account). You can walk through the fields that are necessary to have filled in the ticket upon creation, in planning, during the sprint, and before the sprint closes.
By having this reference tool, your developers can create and update their own tickets with less back-and-forth over process. Or on the flip side, your video will prompt them to ask questions about efficiency or identify process gaps. This has generally been my experience, and it helped my teams make good strides with ticket management.
Make Calendar Reminders Prior to Planning
I used to set a recurring calendar reminder for the team to update their tickets at key intervals, such as before planning (especially if they had tickets in mind to create or move existing tickets into the next sprint) or before closing. This helped with accountability and ownership.
For some team members who I knew had a lot of feature development coming up, I would meet separately with them in a pre-planning session of about a half-hour or so. I’d either pull in a stakeholder they’ve requested or any documentation I know they would need to have a better idea how to plan out the work. This helped to build confidence in the tasks we were creating, as well as make sure the rest of the team wouldn’t be derailed during the actual planning session.
Have Any Ideas of Your Own?
Please share in the comments. Or on the flip side, also feel free to share if you’re in the frustrating position of being the “ticket master”—I’ve been there at the beginning plenty of times.