Friday, October 12, 2018

Due to how we have bastardized Jira, it is becoming less useful as a task board.

Due to how we have bastardized Jira, it is becoming less useful as a task board.

A few days ago, I said fuck it. I got out my most important tools:
-- post it notes, multiple colors
-- Sharpie, black
-- a wall

And I went to TOWN. The tickets are on the wall, showing where they are. It is immediately obvious where our pain points are, and it's lead me to an idea for solving some problems.

It also lead to this exchange:
Senior Dev: I hate Jira!
Me: That's because we're using it wrong.
Dev: ... what do you mean? It's so hard to say a ticket is ready for test.
Me, goes to board, picks up a stickie in "dev" move it to "test". BOOM!
Dev: ..... That's so much easier. Why can't we do that in Jira?
Me: We can. We're just using it wrong.
Dev: ..... ok, I'm on board. How do we fix it?

6 comments:

  1. Grin ... you had to go outside JIRA, to a physical board, to motivate the Dev to consider using JIRA boards?

    ReplyDelete
  2. To begin to prove that the way we are using Jira is not useful, yeah.

    So, each User Story is Jira has the following sub-tasks:
    Development & Unit Test
    Peer Review & Migration
    Test
    Put into PP for the client.

    What's that look like? A WORKFLOW.

    So, the analog task board has DEV / PR / Test / PP as the workflow columns.

    I've been saying we should do this for over a month. I finally realized I could just do it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. We're misusing / underutilizing Jira as well, but what we're doing is so small, it works for us anyway.

    ReplyDelete
  4. If the devs don't think Jira is useful to them then it is just a reporting chore...

    ReplyDelete