Jira Workflow: What Are the Best Practices for Minimizing Sprint Risks
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Jira Workflow: What Are the Best Practices for Minimizing Sprint Risks

December 30th, 2022
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Jira practices are a leading methodology that helps streamline workflow while having incredible control and flexibility in the way you organize teams’ work. It can be applied in any business, but is often associated with software development. Jira tools can be integrated with many other software in order to bring you a complete experience of better managing, progressing, and overseeing your team’s work.  As a VP of engineering in a development department, making sure that your engineering teams have the best tools and conditions is paramount to faster output, better outcome, and team collaboration. 

Jira Workflow is a powerful tool for managing and tracking the progress of software development projects, and integrating with Waydev can provide even more insights and efficiencies. 

One of the key challenges in using Jira Workflow is minimizing risks during a sprint, which can impact the quality and timeliness of deliverables. By using Waydev to track and analyze your team’s performance, you can identify potential risks and take proactive steps to mitigate them. 

In this article, we will explore some best practices for minimizing sprint risks in Jira Workflow, including effective planning, thorough testing, and proactive communication. By following these guidelines and utilizing the power of Waydev integration, you can ensure that your sprints run smoothly and deliver the desired results.

woman working on laptop

What is Jira Workflow?

Jira Workflow is a project management tool that helps track issues throughout the software development life cycle. It comes with dashboards that display default workflows that help you manage and track issues from beginning to end.Jira also includes features that can customize your workflow in different steps in order to fit your needs regarding the specific task or project your team is working on, making it particularly well suited for agile methodologies such as Scrum and Kanban. 

In Jira Workflow, teams can create and track individual tasks or issues that need to be completed as part of the project. These tasks are known as  “issues” in Jira Workflow, and can represent anything from a small bug to a large feature development problem. Each of these issues can be assigned to a team member, given a deadline, and track through the different stages of development.

screen with code

Why Should You Integrate Jira Workflow in Your Development Teams’ Work?

As a VP of engineering in a software development organization, one of your main responsibilities is making sure your teams have the best conditions to get their job done. This means understanding their needs, struggles, and roadblocks, but also providing them with the best tools that will make their workflow run as smoothly as possible. Using Jira workflow will bring great benefits to this process that will reflect in faster output and better planning. Engineers will be able to plan their tasks better and see through issues from beginning to completion. 

Here are the main benefits of integrating Jira software into your teams’ workflow:

Jira Workflow Best Practices in Software Engineering Projects

There are two specific types of engineering work that can be organized within Jira. Each of them refers to a certain body of work that is different in volume and best way to approach. Let’s see the best Jira workflow practices in order to organize these pieces of work based on their individual characteristics. 

  1. Best Jira Workflow Practices for Epic 

Epics refer to a large body of work that is broken down into smaller tasks, also known as issues, stories or user stories (based on the end-users requests). Everything starts with a technological vision for the company elaborated by the CTO and VP of engineering that is then translated into initiatives aligned with business goals. These initiatives translate to product roadmaps and then concrete bodies of work called epics that are broken down into smaller segments – issues or stories.

Because they are so complex and large in volume, epics are usually managed across multiple teams that often work across more than one project, some specialized in a certain area. The individual tasks in which the epic is broken down can be organized in a customizable Jira workflow and displayed on comprehensive dashboards for maximum efficiency and transparency. 

This methodology helps your engineering teams organize the workflow in small, manageable stories that all team members have access to. This way, everyone can see the progress of all issues and the status of the project as they go, making their workflow more efficient. 

Here are the best practices to manage epics with Jira Workflow approach:

engineers around table working on laptop
  1. Best Jira Workflow Practices for Scrum 

Scrum is a framework in Agile that helps engineering teams organize, manage, and track their work. This happens through sprints that are the main event in Scrum methodology. Sprints represent a short period of time when teams manage a set amount of work, and this helps progress product development in a faster, more intense way. 

Scrum sprints work by setting clear goals that should be executed, choosing the exact pieces of work that will be included in this sprint and planning how it will get done, point by point. This sprint backlog will then go in execution, progressing tasks from creation status to in progress to done

Here are the best practices to manage sprints with Jira Workflow approach:

Conduct regular progress reviews to make sure the workflow keeps going. This entails conducting daily check-ins in order to track progress and identify and solve any roadblocks along the way, but also a sprint review after total completion of the sprint.

hands on laptop

Using Jira Workflow Integration to Streamline Engineering Work

Waydev’s Jira Workflow Integration can be a valuable tool for streamlining engineering work by providing real-time updates on the status of issues, analyzing team productivity, and identifying areas for improvement. 

You can integrate Jira workflow dashboards within the Waydev development intelligence platform and use the Sprint integration feature that can help you get a clear view of your sprints’ status. You can use Jira integration to keep track of and optimize workflow of your engineering teams, by signing up for a Waydev account and installing the Jira Integration, then synchronizing your Jira account here. You can select the projects you want to manage and analyze them with custom settings. Now you can view comprehensive analysis data and reports in the Waydev dashboards. 

Contact us today and one of our dedicated Customer Success Managers will provide you with all you need to know about Waydev’s Jira Integration.

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