Workflow and issue statuses in JIRA with a Scrum mode - jira

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.

Related

Is there a way to show commits on subtasks of stories in a Jira scrum board?

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.

Is there a way to display reviewers information of any given issue in the Jira Scrum Board cards?

Currently, developers have to:
click on each card within the "In Review" status in the Jira Scrum Board
click on the "Reviews" tab
click on the review link
finally they are able to see who the reviewers are (if any)
I would like to be able to see, at least, the number of reviewers assigned to a task directly from the Scrum Board cards in Jira as this would be much more efficient than going through each card in the "In Review" status (there may be 20 issues at any given time). Developers would only care about those issues with less than 2 reviewers, so that they can jump in.
How can I achieve this? Thanks a lot for your help!
What you try to achieve (as far as i understood) is already available but depends upon the Jira version and the version of development tools connected with Jira.
Please see e.g. in the official doc: https://confluence.atlassian.com/jira/viewing-the-code-development-information-for-an-issue-445186939.html
Trying to sum things up:
With incompatible or just older versions of development tools (like FishEye/Crucible) or incomplete configuration in Jira you will only see 'Source' and 'Review' tabs which will not provide you directly with the informations you want.
In newer versions and with full integration, Jira does enable a 'Development Tools' panel. Clicking on one of headlines will provide you e.g. with status of reviews and the reviewers within (screenshot: https://confluence.atlassian.com/jira/files/445186939/jira-issue-devpanel.png)

In Atlassian Jira 4.1.2 how can I make a profile that may only view users of the system?

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.

Adding New Work Item Types in TFS 2012

I am new to TFS 2012 and would like some help in customizing a few things. We currently have the TFS setup with the template " MSF for Agile Software Development". This was setup before I started working with TFS. I have done some research online, but I have not been able to get answers for my questions. I was hoping someone could help me customize our TFS a little. Some questions:
How do I add a new Work Item Type? We currently have Bug, Issue, User Story and Task. I would like to add Feature and Product Backlog. I would like to be able to create Product Backlog Items and link the Tasks and User Stories to them.
How do I add different Work Item Types the Kanban Board?
It's a bit much to answer all of your question in a short and concise StackOverflow answer, but here are the starting points:
How to customize Work Item Types
Create s Work Item Type
Add bugs to the task board or backlog
Customize work tracking objects to support your team's processes
witAdmin: Administering Objects for Tracking Work Items
Note: Many of the customization you want to do come out of the box with TFS 2013. It's probably a lot less work and easier to maintain to just upgrade than to introduce all of this customization.
See below link on how to create new work item type.
Modify or add a custom work item type: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh409273.aspx
But it looks like you don't need new work item type here because work item type "Feature" is already available in TFS 2012. See below link. The link is for 2013 but if you switch to 2012 you will see feature there as well.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd997897.aspx
Product backlog item(pbi) is a term used in Scrum so if you use scrum template you will see pbi instead of user story. So user story is your equivalent to pbi.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms400752.aspx

Changing resolved status to Closed status for a user story in Jira

I am using Jira for organizing user stories for my project on Agile approach. When I tried to close a user story it shows the status as ' Resolved', rather than 'Closed'.
Can someone help me how to change the user story status to closed?
Please post your suggestions and help.
Its a bit hard to answer such a vague question - so if you can ellaborate a bit on the customization you have done in your JIRA instance, it can help.
Some pointers:
JIRA is using workflows to manage the flow an issue can use.
The default workflow that comes with an installation of JIRA is called "jira" and looks like this: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Configuring+Workflow
Depending on the customization of your JIRA installation, you can either change the workflow to go from Open to Closed when you use the "Resolve" operation.
If you are not the JIRA administrator, different workflow transitions can have various properties and conditions and validators set on them, for example checking for permissions. So if you are a user that does not have permissions to do a certain transition - you can see if you can change it via the permissions administation panel, or again - in the workflow validations.

Resources