How Wiliam uses Jira

I am obviously bias however it is no secret that Production at Wiliam is one of the most important departments of the business. It is almost a nightly occurrence that once the office has cleared out one of the Production team is still working away into the night. Like a developer needs Visual Studio and a designer need Photoshop, Producers need Jira.

Some background on Jira

For those that don't know Jira is a project management and bug tracking tool developed by the Australian Atlassian team Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar. The company raised $60 million in venture capital just 8 years after it was founded. Atlassian does not have a typical "sales" team instead they rely on recommendations and have all product information and pricing on their website, they do not offer discounts and last year announced booking for $102 million, up 35% from the previous year. The name, JIRA, is a truncation of "Gojira", the Japanese name for Godzilla.

There are various ways that Production use Jira and this depends entirely on the size and complexity of the project. For a large web build we use Jira in the following ways:

Creating stories

After the project has been scoped by the UX team we have a Requirements Definition Document and a Prototype that meticulous outlines the scope and functionality of the project. Once there is this insight into the scope of a project it is possible to carefully plan out the timeline and schedule for that project. A Producer will sit down with some key stakeholders within the project, usually a developer and the UX designer; the purpose of this is to break the scope of the project down into a series of what are called "user stories". Stories are a simple and concise way of capturing "who", "what" and "why" of a requirement. As an example the stories that relate to a newsletter signup box of a site will look somewhat like the following:

1. As a customer I would like to sign up to the website newsletter
2. As a product manager I would like a list of all the users who have subscribed to my newsletter
3. As a product manager I would like to be notified when a user signs up to our newsletter

Below you can see an example of some stories from a large project we developed:

Once the project is broken down into stories they need to be assigned a difficulty score, this helps track the length that each task will take, this is known as "planning poker". Planning poker is a game where each stakeholder in the planning meeting assigns a number to a story, the number is mostly to estimate effort or relative size of the story. It is common for each team member to have a different score amount, which results in discussion and a consensus of what  the final point value will be assigned to that story.
 

Below you can see an example of the planning poker iphone app that we use:

Creating stories for a complex web build can take up to two days and is a tiring yet necessary exercise. It allows a Producer to get a clear understanding of the tasks required throughout the whole of the development phase. All of these stories are loaded into Jira. 

Assigning weekly sprints

Now that the project consists of what is potentially hundreds of stories, they need to be broken down into sprints, otherwise known as iterations; sprints at Wiliam go from Monday to Friday. A sprint is created in Jira and stories are assigned, after the first couple of sprints the Producer is able to get a clear idea of how many story points the developer is capable of completing in that time.

Our clients have complete visibility over the sprints and stories during a project, they are able to log in at any time and see which stories are complete and which are still in the back log.

A Burn down chart

A Burn down chart is a graphical representation of the work left to do versus the time left to do it. Jira allows a Producer, or client to log in at any point and see the Burn down chart for that project. The outstanding work is often on the vertical axis and time is horizontal.

It is critical for predicting when all of the work will be completed, and giving the Producer insight into if a deadline will be met. Often it will be required to assign another resource or de-scope some stories in order for the project deadline to be met. Without the burn down chart the Producer would not know this ahead of time, meaning they can plan for it before the deadline is missed.

Below is an example of what a burn down chart looks like:

After a project has launched - logging bugs

Once a project has launched we use Jira for bug and improvement tracking. During the Wiliam Warranty all bugs are logged in Jira and assigned to the relevant resources. They are prioritised as either a blocker, new feature, task, improvement, epic, story or support ticket. Anything marked as a "blocker" is either delaying launch or is critical if in the live environment.

Kanban board for new improvements

Kanban boards are a visual way of tracking and documenting incremental improvements to a website. Kanban is derived from Lean manufacturing and is a simplistic yet realistic approach to managing improvements. Anytime a new feature is discussed a new ticket is created in Jira, this ticket is assigned to a number of potential "swim lanes". The lanes we generally use at Wiliam are "backlog", "to do", "In development", "done" and "live".

A ticket moves through all the swim lanes, notifying the client at every stop, into the completion phase.

Below you can see an example of the swim lanes set up in a Kanban board.

The beauty of the Kanban board is that you can set WIP limits on each lane, so if an urgent task comes up and the WIP limit is reached a ticket needs to be physically moved out of the "to do" lane for the urgent ticket to go in, it visually shows a client the capacity of development.

Production at Wiliam

Jira is the foundations of how projects are run in Production at Wiliam. We rely on it from the very start until well after a site has been launched. It gives the client insight into their project and helps developers stay on track and focused on the tasks at hand. It plays an important role in launching and maintaining the many successful websites that Wiliam builds every year.