Using Jira-Greenhopper for product management

[Ton van Daelen]

Hi there -

Id like to get in touch with product managers using JG. We have just started using the system and I'd like to learn from other product managers what works and what doesnt. Things I am interested in doing:

• Prioritize epics and user stories based on customer value
• Best practices around using themes
• Dealing with dependencies between products
• Team centric versus product centric organization of JG
• How to quickly regroup epics and user stories
• Assign names of customers to a feature request
• Creating a roadmap report for a product summarizing epics and user stories

Just send me an email or reply to this posting so we can get a discussion going.

Thanks - Ton

[Gary Weaver]

I can try to answer the ones not specific to Greenhopper:

• Prioritizing tasks based on customer value works in some cases, but in many cases should be weighed against the difficulty/time/resources/cost associated with the task.
• Just like in plain Jira, tickets can be linked as dependencies or dependent upon another ticket, or just associated with them. I think that is fairly self-explanitory and a project manager/dev manager should just enforce that developers, etc. set these, if it is really that important. Usually for me this is not much more helpful than just linking to another ticket in a comment, etc.
• I suggest product-centric projects to reduce duplication if multiple teams work on the same product. Atlassian basically uses this method of organization, for the most part. But, if there is concern about access to issues (e.g. Operations should not see dev tix), it might be easier to only keep the work you should have access to together, in which case team-centric projects might be nicer. See also: What is the best way to organize Jira
• If you can get customers to use Jira to create tickets, that is sometimes the easiest and most efficient way rather than having to set their name on a ticket. However, it is inevitable that requests will come in that you have to set manually. I think having a single request owner is good and then just set security to a group that contains everyone that should have access to those issues. This may influence how you want to layout projects in Jira, so it is good to think about ahead of time. Note that obsessing about security can result in a bunch of overhead and tickets that people can't see because the proper security access was not set on a ticket, so be wary of that before going nuts with it.

Be sure to also look at the greenhopper tag in answers!

[Ton van Daelen]

Thanks Gary, that is very helpful. Ill explore this..

- Ton

[Henrik Jönsson]

Your link " What is the best way to organize Jira" links to this answer again.

[Gary Weaver]

@Henrik - Thanks! Fixed the link. Looks like the old link had spaces in the URL, and answers.atlassian.com didn't correct that... somehow that must have kept it from leaving the page. Using the latest URL for that question seems to have fixed it.

[Gary Weaver]

Some of these apply to Jira in-general vs. using Greenhopper with it and might be better as separate questions in answers.atlassian.com.

[Gary Weaver]

Greenhopper is great (we don't use it, but I'd love to). But, has your team considered using notecards (XP style) or Kanban with post-its on a board? Just throwing a tool at things is not a good idea, even though Greenhopper + Jira is awesome and highly recommended by many. I would consider what would work best for the teams and products before making the decision on Greenhopper.