Today's teams are spread across an organization and around the world. Email is not only an inefficient method to capture and track changes to the report, assign tasks, and communicate, it becomes a risky method since things fall through the cracks, and ownership of a step in the process is vague at best. This process helps communication across large teams, but can even help a team of one so that managers or other stakeholders can view the progress in the development process.
While there are several project management, JIRA is a great solution for those that do not have an existing solution. Even the processes mentioned here can be applied to other applications. https://atlassian.com/software/jira
Benefits of JIRA:
JIRA effectively is an issue tracker that has matured to a workflow management and tracking application
Allows cross-geographic teams to understand where things are in the development process
Centralizes communications, takes the discussions away from email
Easy to extract information for reporting
Inexpensive and highly customizable
Can fit into Scrum or Kanban methodologies
Logical Workflow
An end-to-end process can contain multiple steps such as Requirements, ETL, Schema Objects, Reports, and Dashboards. These efforts should be broken up by their final deliverable product, so that requirements would have its own process, ETL and/or database objects would have a process, and Dashboards and Schema Objects could either be a single workflow or discrete workflows. Each step in the process typically has an overall owner or person responsible for that step rather than ownership of the entire process.
By identifying the process of development, one can stake out the ownership of each process and identify the next step ensuring such things as a Peer Review or User Acceptance are followed.
Logical Development Workflow
The process as it applies to MicroStrategy development benefits from:
Ensuring each process occurs and smooth process flow requires keeping track
By setting forth the process in an application such as JIRA, this increases collaboration while also ensuring appropriate ownership at each stage
Track from Development, Peer Review, Test, Production
Includes process for migration of objects
Track minor change requests to allow testers to validate and understand history
We have developed a specific workflow for our clients in JIRA that ensure all steps in the process are followed.
Issue Types
Many different issue types can be used depending on how you would like to structure your JIRA project. One can use a standard 'Story', or create by Database Development, Dashboard Development, Requirements, etc..
Consider Including several, but align the Issue Types to tracking the functions without going overboard.
Bug - A problem which impairs or prevents the functions of the product.
Epic - A significant body of work that encompasses many user stories.
Story - A unit of work adding capability to the product.
Task - A task that needs to be performed that does not impact the software baseline.
Improvement - An enhancement to an existing feature.
Documentation - A task involving software documentation.
Technical Debt - A task that results from poor design choices or incomplete work.
Spike - Used for design, investigation, and prototyping to determine feasibility of design strategies.
Technical Task
External Task
Research Task
Requirements/Design
Research Sub-Task
ETL/Data Integration
Report Development
Dashboard Development
Non-Standard Tasks
Onboarding
Environment troubleshooting
Performance troubleshooting
Research
POC
Requirements refinement
JIRA Issue Interface
The issue interface is highly customizable by issue type allowing for custom fields, but the typical issue still allows for such things as:
Attachments
Labels/Components
Priority
Scrum Points
Comments/Discussion
Linking other Issues
Watching
Work History
