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

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.

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.

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:

• Integration with many other tools, such as Waydev that enables you to synchronize your Jira account with its own dashboard to provide additional insights and analytics into your development processes. 
• Transparency of task status so that each team member has a clear understanding on what they have to do to progress issues and where the project is at. This can be especially useful for teams that are distributed or work remotely
• Encourages collaboration between teams by features such as flags. Developers can flag an issue if they are having trouble progressing it, and another team member can intervene in order to solve the roadblock. 
• Field mapping with advanced roadmaps – this can trace a clear path that epics need in order to break them down into manageable smaller pieces of work. 
• Faster output by using powerful features, such as automation. This automation feature can dictate how stories progress from one stage to another and generate reports on the project status. 

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:

• Break down epics into stories, issues or user stories that are requirements from the end-user’s perspective. This will make the workload more manageable for development teams and easier to keep track of during the progression of issues from one stage to another. 
• Use labels to group epics: Use labels to group epics by theme, product, or other criteria. This can help you track progress and identify areas where automation can be used to streamline your workflow.
• Create roadmaps to ensure your teams stay on track with product goals and general technological vision. An advanced roadmap will give you context and a clear direction for tasks that need to be completed in order to progress product development. 
• Use automation to ensure process consistency. By using the automation feature in Jira, you can make sure that development teams have to go through a certain process and clear steps in order to progress to the next phase and reach the status ”done”. You can set this feature to accomplish different functions according to criteria you set, such as sending an automatic reminder on overdue issues and making sure the teams don’t lose them from sight. 
• Communicate the changes to your team: Make sure that your team is aware of any changes to the epic workflow, and provide them with the necessary training and resources to effectively use the new automation features
• Test automation and monitor it periodically. Before implementing the automation feature within your Jira customized workflow, make sure that it is working properly and as initially intended. Be sure to review it from time to time and check to not cause any issues or blockages.
• Generate reports by using automation. Automation can be used to generate comprehensive reports about your engineering teams’ progress in epics or individual stories, such as burn-down charts and velocity reports, to track progress and identify potential roadblocks. 

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:

• Define clear sprint goals – the first step in establishing any work that needs to be done is setting clear goals and objectives. What does your team want to accomplish during these current sprints and how will this impact the big picture of software development? Start organizing pieces of work by keeping these objectives in focus. 
• Use the task estimation feature – when organizing a scrum sprint workflow, you can customize it by enabling the estimation feature (this doesn’t come in the default option). There are a few different options here that you can personalize depending on your needs – you can choose to estimate issues by story points, time, or progress tracking. 
• Identify and manage dependencies – dependencies happen when a certain task or work area needs input from a certain team before allowing others to intervene and progress that task. With Jira you can add multiple dependencies to a specific issue, with comments and details, so that they are clear to every team involved, and then review saved changes. To further analyze your team’s collaboration, you can use Waydev’s Review Collaboration report that gives you a clear view over the submitter and reviewer metrics of the PR process.

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.

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.