Jira - Project Tracking Tool in an Agile Environment

I have been working in Agile for the past 6 years. Different companies follows different ways in tracking their process. I have worked on three different ways for tracking the user stories in Agile. As a tester I would say, the defects reported should be linked to a user story and once all the testing is complete and there are no open defects then we can say it is ready to go to staging if it does not have any dependent user stories. While testing a user story we always report few bugs and those are tracked again using a defect tracking tool.

In one of the companies that I worked with, in Agile, around 6 yrs ago, we tracked our Sprint burn-down using Excel. 

In another company that I worked on Agile, we used an open source tool "Redmine" for tracking the status of the user story and Team Foundation Server/VisualStudioTeamSystem (TFS/VSTS) for bug reporting and tracking.

Company 1: Excel (Agile) + DSolver (Customized version of Bugzilla for Defect Tracking)

Company 2: Redmine (OpenSource for Agile) + TFS/VSTS ( for Defect Tracking) 

No wonder at least one of us at one point of time turns this way.. :)

So as a tester at the end of the day I had to always work on two different tools for updating the same user story.

I was always thinking how easy would it be if there is a single tool for tracking the complete life cycle of a user story. The life cycle includes:

1. Create a Business Requirement

2. Link it to the Sprint

3. Create an individual task for BA, Design, Dev and Tester to track the progress

4. Tester to report defects  found in testing and linking it to the same userstory and manage complete bug lifecycle.

5. Pass it on to the deployment team to deploy it to staging/production environments once the user story has all the linked tasks completed.

In this way with just opening 1 link we can view the Business document for the user story and the design updates for the user story, the developer deployment versions and the testing status of the user story. This gives a single view for the Manager as well as for the release management in case if we plan to deliver per user story.

Finally in the company that I am working with, we are using "JIRA"  a proprietary issue tracking product developed by Atlassian for bug tracking, issue tracking and project management. GreenHopper is a JIRA plug-in that adds a broad collection of agile project management capabilities to JIRA and extends JIRA as a powerful platform for agile development teams.I found it is a simple and easy tool to work with.

So the business people creates requirements in Jira. Manager will create individual BA, Design, Dev and Test sub-tasks for the requirement. BA, Design, Dev and Tester will update the estimated and actual time in their subtasks. BA will upload the elaborated user story for the requirement in the main task. Designers will start their analysis and documentation work and Testers will start documenting the testcases. Once the testcases are completed and reviewed by designers and Business Analysts it is attached to the same Jira. Developers will update the Jira with the deployed version on to test server. Testers will test and once completed attach the test summary report to the same Jira which is now ready for release to staging server.

JIRA User's Guide: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA050/JIRA+User's+Guide

The Top 5 reasons for JIRA over Bugzilla as mentioned by Atlassian are as follows:

1. Easy to install

2. Polished User Experiece

3. Powerful Search and Reporting

4. Flexible Dashboards

5. Killer Agile Planning (Use GreenHopper for JIRA to build a virtual card wall, manage your backlog, plan sprints, and track team progress)

Sample JIRA dashboard view:

Thanks to

Happy Reading!!