We are migrating from an in-house tool to Jira for managing our scrum board, and we have concerns that I have been unable to resolve by searching the Internet. But you folks are smart, right? ;-)
Our current scrum board shows the usual swim lanes across state columns (for todo, progress, review, done). Each swim lane represents a user story, and has a link to (and a snippet of) the user story description in Jira. It also has a number of 'tickets' (these would be subtasks in Jira lingo) that start in 'todo' and move across to eventually end up in 'done'.
So far, Jira can do all of this, too (although creating sub-tasks is rather a lot more work in Jira than in our in-house tool). However:
When we commit code, we include a ticket ID in the commit message, and thus each ticket displays a list of commits that were done to complete that particular ticket / partial story. I haven't been able to find out how to do this in Jira -- if it's possible at all. Instead, it seems one must open a sub-task to see if there are any commits on it?
Each commit also shows its review state, which gives us an excellent overview of how close to done a ticket really is. I haven't been able to find out how to do this in Jira -- if it's possible at all. Instead, it seems one must open the sub-task, and drill down further into Fisheye(?) in order to see the review state?
In total, our tool provides a one-screen overview of the state of each user story, ticket, commit, and review state; and it's very lightweight to pull in new stories (from Jira) and add tickets. We fear that Jira is not able to provide such a one-screen overview, forcing us to open Fisheye in order to know whether a given commit has passed review.
Is it really true that Jira must be this cumbersome?
For reference, here is what a single ticket (subtask) looks like in our system:
And if you look at the whole scrum board, it's actually quite easy to get a feel for the number of commits on individual user stories and tickets, and the ratio of pending/passed/failed code reviews:
I agree with your fears when you say
We fear that Jira is not able to provide such a one-screen overview
In my experience (7+ years with Jira/Agile) I've not seen a such condensed view of information about a sigle user story even on a swimlane with relative cards.
Also in the Atlassian marketplace there seems to be no good plugin to solve your issue, even partially.
To make such move from your in-house tool to Jira retaining all you have there, I fear you should develop a custom Plug-in using Jira SDK to integrate with the agile boards.
It may be enough to start by developing a custom field to show what you need from a "ticket" (ie sub-issue) and trying to insert it into one of the three "slots" available for cards (I mean Rapidboard card layout configuration screen).
If you wanna try, start from here.
Another option to create a new custom field would be the Adaptavist Scriptrunner plugin. It will ease the building of custom fields: your new field can be written also in Groovy rather than plain Java. I've used it to build an extended status custom field (just to give the user an immediate big picture of it) that informs him in plain english and with stylish css colors why an issue is blocked or anything else relevant, getting data from other fields or linked issues that are not immediately visible to the user. IMHO, it is very similar to your problem.
Related
I am a new user of confluence, I participate in an workflow in witch customer support receives bugs, I report them to a central team of developers. Now, the thing is I am trying to create a way for the customer support team to have more visibility on the issues that I report, as in to quickly find out the status of a certain issues. What I have in mind is a confluence page consisting of a table of the issues extracted from Jira but I am having trouble reaching the exact end product that I have in mind. For example is there a way for me to make a column to this table so I can add comments for some issues? or can I categorize the issues by which pack of developers are they assigned to. Mainly I want to know if there is an alternative way of going about my situation and I don't see it because of my lack of experience.
Thanks!
Rather than adding comments in Confluence I would suggest you instead add them to the Jira tickets and then display them on Confluence.
The Jira Issues macro allows you to chose the fields you display. You could, for example, add a 'Confluence comment' custom field to your Jira tickets and make sure this is shown in Confluence.
As for categorizing issues, this is best done by using filters. The approach would be as follows:
Decide what categories you want
Create a filter for each category
Use the Jira Issues macro multiple times, once for each of the filters
I've been using Bitbucket for a week now. It seems like a capable platform. Personally in my development activities, I keep a daily "journal" of whatever I need to keep track of separately from any commits to the Git repo. It gives me a place to keep all my "thoughts and ideas" in one place.
Before I end a day's work, or I jot down what I last worked on and any thoughts I think I'll need on the following day. And before I begin each day's work, I just flip to the last page of my journal and it quickly brings me back up to speed of where I was at yesterday, no matter how little sleep I got. :-)
I see Bitbucket has "Comments", "Work Log", "History" and "Activity", but they seem to be tied only to user stories, todos and the like.
Does anyone know of a way where I can have something like a "Work Log" tied directly to my user account? I'm thinking I could use it for my personal "Journal".
Note: I'm using a locally installed Bitbucket server.
If you're using the online https://bitbucket.org (not specified in the question) rather than a hosted instance then you can do a couple of things.
1 Wiki
Create a repository which will act as your work log
Obviously if you want to keep notes with the same code base just enable the wiki for that repository. The question seemed to suggest you may want to be repository/project agnostic
Update the settings of the repository to enable a private or public wiki
This is probably the simplest and richest replacement to your note pad
2 Use a repository
Create a repository which will act as your work log
commit Markdown (i.e readme.md or index.md) files
Note: in the case of a hosted instance this could even be a repository associated to your user rather than a project.
This is very manual, though it does mean you can have an offline version of your "pad" that you can edit/search in your IDE with some IDE autocomplete. Just like the wiki you can use the code backtick escapes with syntax highlighting. Last I checked the these were rendered pretty well in the browser through bitbucket.org as well as any editor/IDE you might use.
Regarding todo's
I've found the best cheap todo solution for me is using a gist as described on life hacker. They are low ceremony and versioned which checks all my boxes (excuse the pun). If you couple that with the above you may actually be able to embed it into your bitbucket wiki, though I've not tried.
If you are using JIRA and Bitbucket already, maybe consider Confluence? Confluence has some convenient and easy to manage TODO functionality and it lets you expand on those thoughts with all the power of a wiki when you are done.
I keep a "TODO" page and additionally put the checkbox on any tasks in other pages. They are all aggregated together in a tasks view.
See:
https://confluence.atlassian.com/conf54/confluence-user-s-guide/managing-changes-and-notifications-and-tasks/managing-tasks-in-confluence
Experience with Jira is based on what I have seen from clicking through the project. There is no knowledge transfer as all people who knew this customized system left over a year ago.
As for the Atlassian PDF guide, it is not able to assist because the feature to add users and manage the users in Jira have been removed. An external LDAP system is where the users are managed.
I can view the User Browser and see users and do some editing of a profile and even delete the user from a navigation link in the footer.
But the real question at hand is, what do I need to do in order to
A. Assign users to an Organization Role that only allows them
1: A view only mode of the users in that Organization
2: View the details of the user and that users permissions/roles given
I've been looking for a few days now and just keep running into brick walls.
Thank you.
The upgrading of the system to the new version is not an option due to the extensive undocumented modifications made to Jira. It has been tried 3 times in the past 2 years without success.
I am answering based on JIRA 5.2 and higher experience.
Only place to see list of users is User Manager and you need to be JIRA admin to access it. So it's not a solution for you.
I searched for addon doing this but no luck. Moreover your JIRA is too old to be supported by addon providers.
The same story with JIRA REST API. Looks like for JIRA 4.1 you need to use JIRA REST 1.0 (current is 2.0) and I can not find docs for it.
I believe it's possible to write the addon to accomplish what you need but again it's not smart to invest in obsolete JIRA.
The most right solution is still migrate to the newest version of JIRA. Maybe you need abandon the undocumented changes or rewrite them into JIRA addons. It will not be easy and it can be costly but looks like you do not have too many options.
Task has been abandoned.
No answer to bad implementation and poor engineering practices when one is to continue to follow them.
I'd delete the post entirely but I'd rather give credit to the few that tried to provide some insight. Thanks again.
Currently working with JIRA 5, I was looking for information about the handling Scrum in JIRA 6 with JIRA Agile (formerly Greenhopper). I saw, the there is now 3 statuses: To Do, In Progress, Done.
I find the 3 above statuses not enough. Particulary, we want to know if a story is still beeing clarified with the project owner, if is it a draft, if it has been approved by the customer. For a task, we also want to differenciate different steps in the "done" process: development done, review done, testing done, etc.
I'm looking for experience or any hints about this. My questions are: should I customize the workflow for my needs? Is there any standard workflows which already better supports Scrum? am I completly wrong and should I only use the basic concepts of JIRA for a Scrum process?
Any ideas/hints/experiences/links are welcome. Thank you.
You can customize the JIRA workflow (https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Configuring+Workflow) and then map the new statuses into Agile columns
In case if you already have a configured workflow go to your Agile board, go to its configuration and navigate to tab "Columns". On this screen you can add your custom column name, change its position and drag&drop status to a new column in order to map issues with this status to a column. If you use standard flow and need more customized one which better fits to your process then the link provided by mdoar above explains how to do this in details.
What is the best way to store a task for multiple users in TFS 2010 ? I can only assign one for one task.
(for example: when I plan a demo to all developers)
(this is a scrum Msf Agile project, where the task is part of a user story)
I'm sorry to tell you that you can't assign multiple users to a single work item out of the box; At the same time, I do not recommended trying as this, as it does not fit the model in TFS. The conventional / recommended way to handle this type of scenario is to create multiple tasks; one for each developer in this case. You can easily accomplish this by copying a set of tasks using MS Excel. Another option (given the example you used) is to create a "Meeting" work item that has multiple drop-downs - one for each person that would attend meetings like for a demo or a technical review.
Yet another option is to create a custom control to format and store a list of users. This would likely be relatively complex to maintain, as you have to distribute it to each user's machine (it will need to be installed locally), and last I checked you would need 2 versions; one for the Team Explorer user interface and another for the Web Access tool that most people use to create work items from a web page on their TFS server. Future updates to TFS could possibly break your custom control. It is rarely worth the effort. Another downside is the you would likely be limited by how you can use MS Excel to work with the data you store in the field that the custom control works with. If you want to look into this further you can find some examples in the following CodePlex project: http://witcustomcontrols.codeplex.com/
You might consider your true goals in tracking such things as meetings and other items you want to assign multiple people to. Tasks are the heart of tracking progress of user stories in the MSF Agile Template. Tracking meeting attendance does not typically relate directly to a User Story, for example; so it won't typically assist you to determine how much close you are to being "done" with a User Story. If you want to take advantage of the existing reports, then you should organize your tasks so that they roll up as child work items to User Story (or Bug) work items.
Short story: you can't. Work items in the Process Template of Microsoft are designed to target nobody or only one User.
Now you can customize the Process Template to change this.
Take this post for instance, the customization works for group. But I don't recommend you to do so because TFS is basically not designed for that and you may end up disappointed.