Calling Jira and Confluence Experts!!! Perspectives Required – Gareth Jones

[gareth.jones@business-analysis.com.au]

Gareth Jones
4/24/18
All,

One of our clients is looking to implement Jira and Confluence and has reached out for some advice.

As discussed last week, we are working towards making Jira & Confluence our requirement management tools, integrating this with QC for testing management.

Tegan and Tina are investigating Jira in particular, and have found a plugin that helps with requirements management. Can you advise whether this is the right way to go?

The other questions they have are how to best setup the systems to enable re-use of requirements, and to simplify the way to find requirements. Tegan’s previous experience with Jira has found it difficult to find individual requirements.

BAPL Jira experts, can you please provide your thoughts?

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Miles, Robert
4/24/18
Other recipients: garet…@busanalysts.com.au
Hi Gareth,

The BA in me has a whole bunch of questions (not the least of which would be what are their requirements/objectives) but I will leave those for someone with more experience in confluence/JIRA to start that ball rolling.

I am not sure it is much help but the last release of Confluence/JIRA introduced the Requirement Yogi. Having used it all of once it is a bit clunky but serves a specific purpose to load waterfall style requirements and have them link to multiple JIRA issues/tasks.

This is probably the best video I found about how to use requirements yogi.

Based on my limited observation, the other caution I would give is that confluence/JIRA can quickly become a mess of plugins. It only half does a lot of things and assumes you will get development/plugins to fill the gaps. For example the incident management tools in JIRA allow you log time against tickets but doesn’t seem to provide a way to report on this time.

Finally as a process modelling tool Gliffy, might be the most frustrating tool I have ever used.

Disclaimer – The Atlassian Suite deployed here(OSSSIO) is absolute bare bones and has had no thought regarding tailoring to the business’ needs.

Regards
Rob

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Regards,

Rob Miles
Specialists in Business Analysis

T: 1300 331164 | M: 0407 969 945 | E: rober…@busanalysts.com.au |
W: http://www.busanalysts.com.au

Melbourne | Sydney | Brisbane | Canberra | Adelaide

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Ashley Syna
4/24/18
Other recipients: rober…@busanalysts.com.au, garet…@busanalysts.com.au
Hi Gareth,

I definitely encourage the using of Jira/Confluence for managing requirement,test results and a whole lot more. I love it.
When used properly, what you get it is the most current status of the project with the least amount of maintenance and the whole organization can use it. So much traceability…

But one really needs ask what are the objectives and if the tools can support it and make sure you don’t get it to do something it is not meant to do. Then configure Jira to work the way you want it to. It can get messy if you don’t understand the limitations and try to put in work arounds.

Also, I’d question the need for reusing requirements. Note that there’s a good import/export function that Jira has as well.

Cheers,
Ashley
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Fry, Nathan
4/24/18
Other recipients: ashle…@busanalysts.com.au, rober…@busanalysts.com.au, garet…@busanalysts.com.au
Gareth,

Rummaging through the 1000’s plugins available before even implementing the system is probably the wrong way to go.

I’m very plugin light when it comes to the Altassian products, could be because plugins didn’t exist when I first started using Jira, but more so I think it dilutes the strengths of the product. I’ve seen plugins get implemented without too much thought thinking it would be a silver bullet to manage, track, report etc on projects, it’s not. The core work still needs to be done regardless, which requires effort. If the content added to Jira is questinable a plugin will not provide any benefit.

Plugins have their place but in order to really leverage them you need to ensure you are utilising the core product effectvely which means spending the time to implement it correctly for your business.

Jira is a platform, there is no best way to implement it but there are best practices and key things to consider. Understanding the business development process is a good start.

If a user is finding it hard to locate an issue then it’s only due to two things, lack of training (incl. not following the defined workflows) or poor implementation.

On reusing requirements I’d agree with Ashley, attempting to use Jira to manage this is not a good idea. If there are standard non-functional requierments for example, create a template and import it to Jira for each new project (if relevant).
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Regards,
Nathan Fry

specialists in business analysis
T: 1300 33 11 64 | M: 0478 429 937
E. nathan.fry@busanalysts.com.au | W: http://www.busanalysts.com.au

Melbourne | Sydney | Brisbane | Canberra | Adelaide

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Sohail Chatha
4/24/18
Other recipients: garet…@busanalysts.com.au, rober…@busanalysts.com.au, nath…@busanalysts.com.au, ashle…@busanalysts.com.au
Hi Gareth,

A very insightful & expert feedback by colleagues have been shared already.

My two cents are:

JIRA is for defects/tasks, Confluence is better at content.

JIRA is suitable for tasks because you want to track defects/bug and requests of any kind with an “reference number.” However tracking of issues is one aspect of the overall project delivery.

For capturing text, requirements & interviews, MoM Confluence is used.

As highlighted below both Jira & Confluence can be integrated together but integration would depend what output you are looking for.

have found a plugin that helps with requirements management.è Atlassian marketplace has several solutions for the Requirement Management. As Nathan & Rob mentioned – depends on what the project requirement(s) is & then based on that specific solution can be adopted based on research.

how to best setup the systems to enable re-use of requirements, and to simplify the way to find requirements è In case of waterfall integration between Confluence & JIRA is most beneficial. Excel export of requirements is available & can be manipulated to achieve the desired customization.

Description: Description: https://www.business-analysis.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Logo-With-Tagline-in-Blue@1.5x-100-signature.jpeg

Sohail Chatha

specialists in business analysis

T: 1300 33 11 64 | M: 0412 851 473

E. sohail.chatha@busanalysts.com.au | W: http://www.busanalysts.com.au

Melbourne | Sydney | Brisbane | Canberra | Adelaide

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Steve Cuming
5/6/18
I’m not an expert at Jira, but I have used it on a number of projects, including a large scaled agile project for a financial institution. It’s a great tool. Needs to be set up properly to reflect the Kanban workflow. I’ve also used Trello, which is a toy in comparison. There is also no point using Jira unless you are doing agile properly.

Jira + Confluence + Bitbucket + Bamboo also provide a good solution for the complete develops/continuous release process. Having said that, I’m not an expert in this area, but RACV are highly invested in this suite for their agile projects.

I’d be interested if anybody has experience in migration from Confluence to SharePoint. There is a view amongst some in RACV that they should do this (which works against the principles above). I’m interested in any reasons why/why not do this, the level of difficulty, and what to plan for.

If anybody can help me with this, please call me, or post a reply. If you are in Melbourne I’ll buy you a coffee.

Steve
0412 507 629
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Fry, Nathan
5/8/18
Re: [Forum] Re: Calling Jira and Confluence Experts!!! Perspectives Required
Other recipients: steve…@busanalysts.com.au
​Steve,

Quick FYI, some of the best Waterfall projects I’ve worked on used Jira and it was very effective. It’s also a very strong business development tool to manage tasks, where there is no system development at all. In either case Trello can also be used, not as an alternative but to complement Jira, it’s not really a one better than the other situation. Trello is also now owned by Altassian so it’s part of their whole SDLC product suite.

But getting to the questions, I’d always recommend using a third party tool to migrate data, a quick google search returned ‘Deployer’ and ‘Metalogix’. Also I’d keep in mind that these tools are very different. Confluence is basically a Wiki and Sharepoint is a document management system. I suppose it depends on what you are looking to migrate.

From my experience the benefits of using Confluence to purely gather or manage information to support Jira is pretty trivial. The integration between these two is not that great in that there is no real optimisation. It really just provides links to and from each system. That could also be done with Sharepoint with very little effort, that said I don’t like Sharepoint, probably because I’ve never been in a company that has utilised it correctly. Always ends up being a document graveyard.

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Regards,
Nathan Fry

specialists in business analysis
T: 1300 33 11 64 | M: 0478 429 937
E. nathan.fry@busanalysts.com.au | W: http://www.busanalysts.com.au

Melbourne | Sydney | Brisbane | Canberra | Adelaide

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Miles, Robert
5/8/18
Re: [Forum] Re: Calling Jira and Confluence Experts!!! Perspectives Required
Other recipients: nath…@busanalysts.com.au, steve…@busanalysts.com.au
Hi All,

Out of the box sharepoint has (basically) nothing to manage projects. The “microsoft” path is to install project server next to it and run project throught that. I make the distinction here only because I dont know which version of sharepoint you are using. Even in 2016 they are stand-alone products but you cant really run 2016 project server without sharepoint.

The other path is much like atalassian is to install add-ons/plugins to manage projects.

Regards
Rob
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Regards,

Rob Miles
Specialists in Business Analysis

T: 1300 331164 | M: 0407 969 945 | E: rober…@busanalysts.com.au |
W: http://www.busanalysts.com.au

Melbourne | Sydney | Brisbane | Canberra | Adelaide

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