Preface
The previous article talked about confluence, a knowledge management tool, from Atlassian, Australia. Coincidentally, the Jira to be introduced today is also from Atlassian. However, he is no longer a knowledge management tool, but a project and transaction tracking tool, it is widely used in defect tracking, customer service, requirement collection, process approval, task tracking, project tracking and agile management.
Background
Before talking about Jira, we have to talk about agile development. JIRA is a project management tool suitable for agile development because the project is based on Agile development. Of course, agile development will not be described in a major chapter here. previous articles detail the ultimate journey of agile development series. Here we will briefly repeat the agile development process.
Process
Agile development is also a popular software development model in recent years. In Agile development, there are many different types. In our development process, we chose scrum. Scrum is a flexible software management process that can help control iterative and incremental software development processes, mainly used for product development or work management.
The agile development of scrum is relatively strict with the process control. Each stage has a complete set of processes and strict time control. shows the main development process of our project team:
Introduction
After learning about the agile development scrum process, let's talk about Jira. As mentioned above, JIRA is an excellent problem tracking and management tool. JIRA adopts J2EE technology and can be deployed across platforms. Of course, for us, the most important feature is to help manage agile development. After the Sprint plan meeting, the product manager adds the discussed sprint task list to the story of Jira. It also contains the specific business for development, the development time, technical difficulty, and so on. You can select your desired task on Jira. So we started a development iteration.
Function
Considering that the installation and configuration of Jira are relatively simple and there are many tutorials on the Internet, I will not go into details here. Here we recommend an article about Jira installation and configuration, jira5.0 + greennet per6.1.6 installation. Of course, I also have a more detailed tutorial here, which is used for training during project development. Because of the large number of documents, I will not post it on my blog. If you need it, just contact me. Here, I plan to select several important functions for you to talk about.
After JIRA is installed, you must first create a project. Here we use the permission system as an example. This section briefly introduces how to add and set a new project.
After the project is added, the default Jira type is bug, and we want to manage the agile development process. Therefore, it must correspond to the tasks in Agile development, in this case, you need to manually modify the default order of issue and issue.
JIRA is based on workflows and provides powerful workflow management. By default, Jira provides five states: open, close, resolve, in progress, and reopen. In actual use, these statuses often fail to meet the requirements. For example, if an ongoing task suddenly finds that it does not meet the conditions and needs to be suspended, which one should it put in?
On the greenhopper panel, story, task, and sub-task are listed. In our thinking, story and task do not want them to be the same processing process. For example, for story, we only want it to be from open to resolve or close, and do not need to enter in progress. Based on these problems, we need to create a workflow suitable for our project development.
JIRA provides custom workflows for you to set workflows to meet your work needs. The following describes the specific configuration.
First, remove the state that is not used in the default workflow and save it.
So far, we have deleted the unnecessary status. Of course, we also need to add a status to complete our own workflow.
Now, the custom workflow is complete. Next, you need to configure the workflow scheme. Here we will not introduce it any more. If you need it, just look for me.
Feelings
Because the previous project also used a domestic project management tool called Zen Dao, but for agile development, based on the scrum concept and development process, I always think that Zen is not suitable (personal feeling). It is undeniable that Zen has already done a good job. I just feel that it is not suitable for our agile development project. After learning about Jira, we found that JIRA is more suitable for agile development.
In the design philosophy of Jira, there is a series of support for scrum. When you start an iteration, Jira will help you record any time point, from to-do → processing → pending → complete. These statuses can be converted to each other based on specific conditions, specific tasks, and specific environments. A detailed record is displayed when a status is not completed. In addition, Jira records the workload of each member and counts the number of tasks completed by each member. This is also an important part of performance appraisal.
Conclusion
Through Jira, we can quickly implement agile development and automatically manage all aspects of agile development, so that we can focus on business implementation and technical points. Moreover, with Jira, in Agile development, collaboration between team members is more efficient, and there will no longer be a situation where "Someone is busy and someone is idle. When the conditions for a task cannot be met, You can first suspend the task and re-start a new task. When the current task meets the conditions, it is re-activated.
In my opinion, agile development is to simplify the task and refine the task. Then, the development time is refined to each task, and the task is completed in the shortest time. This is why agile development does not advocate overtime. What is important is not the agile development process, but the idea of agile development.
JIRA is not only a project management tool, but also an agile development idea.
Project management tools-Jira
