Tracking user stories in JIRA / Greenhopper [closed]

Question

If anyone is trying to do agile, i am trying to figure out a way to use JIRA / Greenhopper for this. We are a global dev team so the distributed nature is crucial here.

We were initially using Scrumworks but the team complained that they had duplicate information in JIRA and scrumworks all the time and thought it was redundant.

We got Greenhopper and thought that would solve our problems but the problems that i have with this are:

1. No User story concept in JIRA
2. Greenhopper too "task" focused without aggregation at the user story level.

Has anyone successfully done this in JIRA or should we look at moving back to other tools like scrumworks and just use JIRA for bugs raised by our support team.

Sawtoothed

You should add to your description that this is about a distributed team. That's vital to being able to give a good answer. Also, what exactly do you mean by "user story concept" in this context? – Repp

in scrumworks for example, you create user stories, like "as a user, I can XYZ". Then you can add acceptance tests to show that this is succesful. Then you can break down a set of tasks to complete this story. This is what i am referring to. – Sawtoothed

Good question for programmers.stackexchange.com. – Boggers

Answer 1

You can add your own Issue types in JIRA. Just add a type called User Story.

Then make sure to enable your sub-tasks feature in JIRA. You will then be able to explode your stories int multiple Subtasks. The integration of the subtasks is pretty nice if you reuse the Ranking feature. See: http://www.greenpeppersoftware.com/confluence/display/GH/PLANNING+BOARD#PLANNINGBOARD-ordering

You will then be able to

1) Estimate your Stories in Story points

2) Prioritize your issues (with the ranking field)

3) Explode your stories in multiple subtasks that you will estimate in hours.

You should post your questions on the GreenHopper forum, might have more and quicker answers. http://www.greenpeppersoftware.com/site/forums/list.page

Cheers,

Michell

The first link does not work. Can someone post the right link? – Fiddlefaddle

Answer 2

I'm using Jira 4.3 and Greenhopper and it supports user stories out of the box. There also support for Epics and Themes but you have to do a bit of configuring. Likely this built in functionality was added after the date of the original question.

Conidium

Answer 3

You might also try using an Agile Lifecycle Management product such as Rally, www.rallydev.com. Rally is built from the ground up to support any agile process and create comprehensive reports across teams. Check it out.

Burns

Mmm...dunno about that. Rally doesn't interface nicely with Jira. There is a plugin available that's supposed to interface the two but it's really buggy. I've also found Rally to be less than intuitive. – Sismondi

Answer 4

Try Mingle - this has a great integration with Jira allowing software dev teams (using Mingle) and support teams (using Jira) to work the way they want.

Backsword