In Jira, linking items together is easy and useful.
For example, you can clone an issue easily: Create issue 100, clone it to 101. 100 then shows "this issue has a clone: 101" and 101 then shows "this issue is a clone: 100"
Similarly, you can mark issue 201 as being duplicate of 200 (reverse is 200 is duplicated by 201), and there are a few other link types.
My question is around the use of related tickets. One side of the relationship is marked "This issue is related to ..." and the other side says "This issue is a relative of ...".
How does your dev team define those two items? It wouldn't matter much except the display is different, making the link types slightly different and it just looks like they are different when one issue is "a relative of" a few other issues, but also is "related to" some others....
In JIRA, links are directed, i.e. not symmetrical. One part of the link is the "source", with one role, like "duplicates", the other is the "target" with another role - "is duplicate of".
When you have a symmetrical link semantics, like issues related to each other, this just does not work well. You can name both roles equally ("is related to" -- "is related to"), and this will work to some extent. You can expect "is related to" appear twice where you select a link type, for example.
In your JIRA configration, this probably lead administrators to define the roles for the "related" link type differently. But I guess this is more a bug than a feature, and you can safely ignore the differences between two names of the same relationship.
An example of link that we implemented is
Feature <-- describes --> Epic <-- details --> Story
A feature request is something that gets planned in a release.
The feature is described by a number of high level epics.
Stories are used to provide the details of these epics. Stories
are 'INVEST'
The link relationships are
Describes
x 'is described by' y
y 'describes' x
Details
x 'is detailed in' y
y 'details' x
Drawing a entity relationship model and naming the relations is helping a lot to develop the issuelink definitions.
Francis
Facing the very same question I've read seredas answer and it is explaining the background of directed links vs. symmetrical semantics nicely (+1) - interestingly though this explanation led me to a different conclusion for practical use in JIRA:
As Steve Melnikoffs comment correctly puts it, it comes down to how the reader interprets the text, here is how I do now: while Relation has the least specific link semantic, kind of a catch all link in absence of a more specific one, there is usually still one issue (the source) triggering this relation to another one (the target), and this fact is visible in the JIRA UI by listing the the active participants of a link in the left column and the passive ones in the right one.
I've checked this conclusion against a couple of projects I'm participating in, and I'd confirm this impression now, i.e. trying to apply relates to from that angle makes the participating issues a bit easier to interpret for me at a glance.
I have encountered similar feature in JIRA lately and I must say I was pretty much convinced that there's no feature hidden behind. I can understand the need of addressing the orientation of the relation between two task theoretically .. but practically it might not be that relevant because from my experience if you work with task tracking system on regular basis, you begin to ignore the features without any noticable effect very quickly.
.. what interests me is whether there's any plugin for JIRA that bases its functionality or UI on this attribute of relation orientation.
It really depends on the interpretation you and your teams agree upon.
In our JIRA we found the default "relates to" labels to be too ambiguous, so we modified the default inward & outward labels to read "relates to" and "is related to" to distinguish link direction, while agreeing that the issues are related in a nature that can only be understood by reading both issues on a case-by-case basis, and that the direction only indicates from which issue the link was created and means nothing more. Even with these changes, we have found that this link type doesn't actually provide much meaning beyond serving as a sort of reminder depending on context. Recently we created several new issue link types to more concretely indicate the nature of related issues, serving us /much/ better.
If you want to dive a little deeper into issue links and the default issue link types in JIRA, we have published some info here.
Related
Is there a preferred way of creating BDD scenarios in small agile teams and amongst the community? I'm using courgette and it gives an example on https://courgette-testing.com/bdd
Scenario: Refunded items should be returned to stock
Given a customer previously bought a black sweater from me
And I have three black sweaters in stock.
When they return the black sweater for a refund
Then I should have four black sweaters in stock.
Does this sound like a good idea? Would this work well for communication in teams?
I've used their web steps bit, and am now doing the refactor bit to make it clear to the business.
Any links would help. Thanks
The conversations in BDD are more important than the tools. Rather than starting with the finely-grained specification in Courgette's example, try talking to the business first. Ask them for an example of the kind of behaviour they want.
When you write it down, start by just writing it the way they describe it. It's amazing how few people listen properly! After you've got the example from them, take a look at it. Can you see which bits are the contexts (Givens) and which are the outcomes (Thens)? Which is the step that's associated with triggering the behaviour you're interested in (Whens)?
Once you've worked that out, there are a couple more questions I like to ask:
Is there any other context which, for this same event, gives a different outcome?
Is there any other outcome that's important?
For instance, if I was implementing this behaviour for a big supermarket, I might come across an example like:
"Oh! No, don't add food back to stock. We don't know how it's been stored. We refund it if there's something wrong with it, but we bin it."
You can probably see how that might change your code!
Testers are really great at asking these questions and spotting missing scenarios! This leads us to the "Three Amigos" pattern. I like to include:
A business person, Product Owner, subject matter expert or person with the problem
A tester
A dev (or a pair of devs).
You can also include UI designers, technical writers, etc. - Matt Wynne says it's "Three Amigos where three is a number between 3 and 7".
I really like it when the developer writes the scenarios down, in any form that allows them to get to the "Given, When, Then". Sometimes I'll do it in the meeting; sometimes I do it later and show it or send it to my business person.
Courgette's example is something that typically happens when people don't have these conversations. If you start with the conversations, you're much more likely to get something that matches the above. Not only are those declarative steps easier for business to read and for the whole team to talk about, but they're also easier to maintain, as the detail of how they're achieved is hidden (usually in Step Definitions, and further in Page Objects).
There's all kinds of useful posts for BDD newcomers on my blog if you want to know more!
I've just started using SpecFlow. It's a tool for creating business understandable test scenarios in a BDD manner. Basically it transforms user stories to unit tests.
I'm a beginner to user stories and I wonder about its length. Is this a good practice to create very precise user stories? Here's an example:
In order to get help
As a StackOverflow user
I want to add post
with name and content
and add tags to it
and format the content
and the information about my post edits to be stored in the system
and some more things like that
Should I keep my stories compact? If so - how can I manage detailed requirements? Or maybe it's nothing wrong in very long and precise I want section in a user story?
If you could develop an entire system in a couple of weeks, and do that reliably, nobody would ever worry about "user stories". They'd just get you to develop the system, sit with you, and tweak it as it went.
User stories only exist in order to get feedback from people who can't be with you all the time, and to help you learn what it is that your users (and other stakeholders) really want.
Here's how I treat a list like this:
In order to get help
As a StackOverflow user
I want to add post
with name and content
and add tags to it
and format the content
and the information about my post edits to be stored in the system
You want to get help. Which of these actually add to your ability to get help? Is it you wanting help, or do you want to offer help to other people? Do you want recognition for the help you're offering other people? The top part of this seems false (and it's why it's really difficult to have these conversations with fake requirements).
I think there are multiple requirements here, and far beyond the scope of just one user story. With an analyst hat on, here's how I might break this down:
In order to award great content with appropriate recognition,
as Stack Exchange,
we want people's usernames to appear with their content.
Of course, the users want this too, but they're not paying for it (except through adverts). So work out who's paying for this, and why.
In order to get more page impressions and keep people on the site for longer,
as Stack Exchange,
we want users to be able to find similar content really easily.
Hm. This one's a bit trickier. See, the user doesn't really want to spend their entire life on StackOverflow. It's just that if we give them the appropriate recognition, and make it easier for others to find their content, they might do that. Not all "user stories" actually benefit users. Find out who's paying for them, and why; then you find your real stakeholder. It's also OK for a story to benefit more than one stakeholder, and it's easy to see how to rephrase this from the user's point of view as well.
format the content
Honestly not sure about this one. It might be about being able to emphasise important points, etc. There are a ton of aesthetic ideals that don't lend themselves well to BDD and automated scenarios. Sometimes the only way to do this is to try, and get feedback.
In order to avoid retyping my request every time
As the user
I want the information about my post edits to be stored in the system
Well, yes, that would be nice.
The thing is that each of these can be developed independently. If you can think of any feature, any item that you could get rid of and still have the release be valuable, put it in a separate story.
If you can replace "I want to..." with "I want to be able to..." it's likely that what you have there isn't a story, but an entire capability. Most people do this instinctively. Lots of people call those "epics".
I've just shown you how I break them down. It's a pretty simple process.
First, look at your requirements. If there's anything for which you can say, "I want to be able to..." or "Someone wants to be able to..." then you know that's a completely different capability, which means it's going to be a separate story.
You can then separate those into contexts. So you might have stories like:
In order to free up our junior traders
We want them to be able to generate contracts automatically
So that they can help with the trade analysis instead of typing.
If that seems too big for the feedback cycle (typically a two-week sprint), you can divide it further.
In order to free up our junior traders
We want them to be able to generate *orange juice* contracts automatically
So that they can help with the trade analysis instead of typing.
Here, we're focusing on being able to trade orange juice, but we could equally narrow the story down to the FTSE, or the US, or the NY stock exchange. This is how we focus the efforts on the thing that will deliver: protecting revenue, lowering costs or generating value.
To turn these into scenarios, I ask, "Can you give me an example of an OJ trade on the NY stock exchange?" If I see anything generic that I don't understand, I ask, "Can you give me an example of that?"
That example becomes my first scenario. The context (given) is defined by the limits of the story. The event (when) is the performance of the capability. The outcome (then) is the resulting value.
In answer to your question - yes, I think it's important to create precise user stories. That means knowing why it's valuable, defining the context that you're going to cover, and suggesting an example of what the outcome might be.
The example you gave is more than just one story, though. It's not precise enough. Hopefully the advice here will help you to narrow stories down to something useful. One or two days is a good length for a story, but if you're starting down this path and find they're a bit longer, that's OK.
Your changes are also stories.
I always advise the following:
Try cutting your stories in scenarios. The more scenarios, the better you can pinpoint when something is going wrong. Give all scenarios subjective names.
Now for example, your test. If step 1 goes wrong, all your other steps are not going to get tested.
Also use the Given, When and Then tags to read your scenarios easily.
So instead, you could say:
Feature: As a StackOverflow user I want to add a post
Scenario: I go to stackoverflow website
Given I open the browser
And I go to the stackoverflow website
When I click New Post
Then a new page appears to insert my data
Scenario: I fill in data for my post - Name and content
Given I do not modify this page
When I fill in name
And I fill in content
Then I add tags to it
And I format the content
Scenario: Check if information about post edits are stored in the system
Given...
Guess you will get where this is going :-)
There is no right detail level of user stories, as user stories shrink in size (scope) and grow in detail (specifications) over time. This slide shows a nice visualization from Gojko Adzic about this: http://www.slideshare.net/chassa/2015-0214agile-reqend2endcomplete/6
For the question on how precise and detailed a Gherkin scenario should be: Scenario should reveal interesting aspects of the user story to be implemented. They should use concrete (key) examples rather than abstract descriptions. The examples should focus on the aspect that should be illustrated. The scenario title should be an abstract description of the rule or aspect that is illustrated with the example(s) provided in the scenario.
You usually start with a main aspect (happy path) scenario, and then try to “break the model” by coming up with new examples (cases) that explore other aspects of the story. You start by asking the questions “How would you try out the story when it was implemented?” (happy path) and “What should happen if …?” to collect potential scenarios to consider (probably defining some of the questions to be out of scope for this story).
After that, you’re trying to answer these questions (scenario title) and illustrate them with concrete examples (scenario steps). This slide gives an idea of “break the model”: http://www.slideshare.net/chassa/2015-0214agile-reqend2endcomplete/61
This blog has a definition of epics in JIRA:
Epics are significantly larger bodies of work. Epics are feature-level work that encompasses many user stories. Using the above example, an epic might be the entire account management feature and the ability to see previous purchases.
So if (as a product owner) I have a large feature I want delivered that will comprise many smaller tasks and likely span sprints, then an epic is a good choice.
However, I could just as easily create a (using the example from the blog) "Account Management" component, and any task related to that feature have that component assigned.
Similarly I could also just as easily use a label of "Account_Management", and any stories/tickets that are a part of the Account Management feature simply get tagged with that label.
So my question: why/what circumstances would you use an epic? why/what circumstances would you use a component? Why/what circumstances would you use a label? Ie - all three (epics, labels, components) seem to serve very similar purposes (grouping a collection of issues), what's the difference?
With labels and components if you want to select a group of them you need to use issue search. If you are using epics you can use issue search as well, but you also get built-in functionality in JIRA Agile.
In the backlog view of a JIRA Agile board you have an Epic tab. This tab allows you to select the issues associated with individual epics. Plus it has functionality that makes it simple to add new issues to an epic. The final advantage is that the epic name is displayed brightly coloured alongside the issues in the list. This can be very useful when viewing the backlog and getting a feel for what work is coming up next.
You can see more about epics on the Atlassian Working with Epics page.
Components are useful for the technical team as they can span across many epics. A typical component might be 'database' or 'UI'. JIRA offers the option to assign work for a particular component to a particular JIRA user. For example, all issues created with a component of 'database' could be assigned to Jill Smith.
Labels are much more adaptable and they have the advantage of allowing multiple assignments (so more than one label can be associated with an issue). With labels it is very much up to you how you use them.
Epics by definition are short-lived issues when compared to the project as a whole. Components and Labels on the other hand are forever. And, you should stick to use them by their true meanings however tempting it may be otherwise.
Create Epics for features, or as mentioned by #Sateesh, for bigger stories. They should solve their purpose, and once the business need is done for, they should then be closed/done.
Components are not features. They are the technical parts of the system. They can also be used for categorizing your parts or... well, components :P... of your product.
Labels can be anything, as mentioned by #barnaby. Typically, they are keywords, catch-phrases, words people may want a task to relate to, etc. I use it mainly to make issues better searchable from a long-term perspective. There is a JIRA plugin which gives you a JIRA label cloud (for purely fancy purposes, I feel :D) that might interest you, too.
Addition:
Atlasian now have created a new article explaining this from their perspective.
https://www.atlassian.com/agile/delivery-vehicles
My opinion / usage.
Labels and Components are almost straightforward and well answered already.
Components examples
Android client app
Server API
Database
etc.....
Labels examples.
Business logic sectors (ex Orders,Invoices,Users, Products)
Code Quality Improvement
Refactor
Usability
User request/complain
Generally whatever helps categorize things.
But let me give my two cents about Epics because i find this phrase way too generic.
Epics are significantly larger bodies of work
Larger? 10 Sprints? 10 Stories? 20 Stories? or what?
Personally i would classify Epics as Goals or Major Releases.
At a Yearly / Quarter Retrospective your company holds a meeting with all members and stakeholders , and concludes to the following
We need to target more platforms (epic = Platform Expanding)
Our support personnel needs more tools to handle issues. (Enrich Support tools)
The software is too hard to use! ( Redesign UI UX)
This would mean 3 epics with set of stories to cover each of those generic requirements
Epics are bigger stories which require more than one sprint to complete. One Epic may involve several user stories. Each user story may belong to one or more Component. Say, you have an epic airline availability search. This may have multiple User stories like OW search, RT search etc., Some or all of them may involve components like cache, travel policy & booking engine.
Labels are just for convenience. It may not have physical significance.
I need to start using JIRA for estimation and came across a scenario I have not found a good solution for yet. Consider an installation with more than one project which is already populated with many existing issues. Many of these issues are linked to other issues (not necessarily in the same project).
How can we configure a special link (say "parent of") and fields to record both effort estimate and logged work so that when any of the "children" are updated, some special field in the parent gets updated to reflect the corresponding aggregated values?
Just to be clear here, two issues A and B may be linked in more than one way (e.g. "parent of", "duplicate of", "relates to", "depends on", etc). However, aggregation of the special fields should only happen for a specific type of link. You can see the point when you think of the "duplicate of" link which clearly should not be aggregated.
Task & Sub-Task has exact same behaviour. Logging work in Sub-Task updates Task's work log counter.
I'm just starting with BDD and I'm trying to build a small app, so I can see it working in a real environment, but I'm having trouble deciding what should be a feature. I'm building a tiny shop.
I decided that "Compare products" will be a feature and "User can checkout as guest" will be one, but to get to that, I first need to list products.
My question is, should "There should be a list of products" be a feature?
Thanks!
It should probably be a feature, but try wording it from a user's point of view. What does this list of product offer him?
User should be able to get an overview of offered products
User should be able to order and reorder products on name, price, availability.
It's pretty hard to begin doing BDD. The only thing that helps feeling confident in your abilities and the whole approach is to write test scenarios and the code that executes them. I would suggest you not to make already complex and confusing situation harder. Pick whatever task that you need to implement, open a blank text file and try to explain using simple sentences the behavior. Every sentence should start with one of three keywords: given, when and then. Using your favorite BDD framework write the code that will parse these sentences and stimulate the application to get into the start state (given), execute some commands (when) and assert the transitioned state (then). Application code may start from mere mocks. Replace gradually those mocks with gradually built code and grow your application with higher confidence and quality levels.
User story is a feature. Something that can be expressed in format:
As role
I would like to do something
So that goal
E.g.
As user
I would like to be able to compare products
So that I can select a product satisfying my needs in a best way
As guest
I would like to checkout my shopping cart
So that I can complete the purchase
Each feature have to be confirmed by a series of Given-When-Then scenarios of course.
You're basically asking what is a feature. Think about it, you have a story, a story describes a feature you (or other people involved) want for your app. Usually it has the form of: As a user I want to view list of products. You may add notes to this story, in order to make it more clear. But then comes the specific behaviour (that eventually you will test against) - there are infinite number of behaviours that conform to this story (think about view of products and the many ways to present them). Your focus, in BDD, is on finding the behaviour that suite your app needs (I use app and not user, because sometimes you should decide for the user) - by talking to as many people as you can, by trying stuff out and iterating it over.
It's like going from top to bottom - always trying to focus on behaviour - being more specific as you go. If you think about it, given a behaviour (meaning a set of tests) there is an infinite number of implementations. That's why the focus of BDD is to truly understand the behaviour by experimenting and talking - there is always a degree of freedom.
More important would be to figure out what the user wants to do with the list of products?
the feature would be providing something valuable to the user.
so in your case it would be
Choose a product to view from a list of products
Choose x products to compare from a list of products
Others
I would classify a feature as a minimum useful set of stories that deliver some coherent (business) value.
for BDD framework see http://kernowcode.wordpress.com
To determine, if a requirement is an explicit feature / user story, you could use the guidelines of task based design / documentation (e.g. http://www.sprez.com/articles/task-documentation-design.html). Such concepts acknowledge that a user of a system wants to achieve a specific result. Usually, to know something (such as: which products are available) is only a step in the process of purchasing / selling / building / etc.
A good starting point in BDD is to write the topics you would use as chapters in your user manual. These topics are usually the features you are going to provide in your software solution.
A nice framework that supports such an approach of specification-by-example is Concordion (http://concordion.org). Please have a look at the description of “acceptance tests in plain English” (http://gojko.net/2009/09/01/acceptance-testing-in-plain-english-with-concordion-net/).