Skip to content

Jira usage principles

Developers, project managers, testers and system administrators all have different experience and opinions with regards to how issue trackers should be used. Following the DevOps mindset, it makes sense to try to bridge our differences and try to agree on some common principles. The principles should work for Kanban and Scrum teams using Jira.

  1. Limit the number of issues which is work in progress as this improves efficiency. See Why Limit Work in Progress? and Importance of Kanban work-in-progress (WIP) limits.
  2. Don't allocate issues upfront - let team member pull an issue when she is ready to start on the task. This avoids the problem of a team member "locking tasks" which another team member could possibly start working on. Again, improves efficiency.
  3. Follow the default Issue workflow. This is a basic, very generic flow which suites most agile development teams. Kanban teams can also use this scheme without any modifications.